NFL Open Thread: All Madden Edition

This is a great piece about what made Madden such an exceptional and massively influential broadcaster:

Given his larger-than-life appetites and fondness for saying “boom!” and “doink!,” Madden’s closest cultural analogue is probably the doltish sitcom dad. But Madden wasn’t Homer Simpson in a headset. What he proved every week, and what his imitators still haven’t figured out, is that an everyman doesn’t have to be an idiot.

Too many of Madden’s television peers think the best way to appeal to a mass audience—to be “relatable”—is to play dumb. I wrote about this phenomenon during the 2012 Olympics, when Meredith Vieira, an intelligent person who was no doubt assisted by a small army of researchers, described a stadium light show as “one more thing I don’t understand.” I don’t mean to pick on Vieira—proud professions of ignorance are a go-to broadcasting cliché. Tune in to pretty much any sports broadcast, and you’ll hear an announcer yukking it up about how he got a D in study hall and never mastered anything more advanced than the pick-and-roll or the bump-and-run.

As Bryan Curtis explained in the Ringer, Madden built trust with viewers by sharing what he knew, not reveling in what he didn’t. His broadcasts were a classroom, a place “where you’d get a little smarter and the professor would never act like he was smarter than you.”

You can see that Madden-as-teacher persona in this demonstration of the ins and outs of the Chicago Bears’ 46 defense.

“Unpretentious” and “playing dumb” are very different things, and too much bad media fails to grasp the difference. R.I.P.