Football fans are generally separated into two groups--those who think John Madden has made the complex game of football accessible to the masses, and those who think he's an idiot who invariably says stupid and
patently obvious things.
He spent several years on
FOX sharing the booth with
Pat Summerall as the network's top broadcast team. Now that Summerall has retired and Madden's contract is up, however, Madden is moving to
ABC's Monday Night Football alongside longtime play-by-play man
Al Michaels.
Madden popularized the
telestrator, the device that lets commentators draw on the screen to illustrate their observations.
He gives his name to the long-running series of football games made by
EA Sports; each year's version of the game is usually considered the best football game ever made. However, this is often true in spite of Madden's
in-game commentary, which serves only to magnify his purported weaknesses--that he says the obvious and repeats himself too much.
Madden is quite fat, and if ever a movie of his life is made,
Brian Dennehy will play him. (Just a hunch of mine.)