Two years ago, the National Football League lost a once-in-a-generation icon… John Madden was someone whose oversized impact on the game of football cannot possibly be properly explained away in just a few hundred words like I'll be attempting to do here, but that won't prevent me from trying. Fortunately, I got a little bit of help from the Las Vegas Raiders, who posted a very touching tribute to their former head coach on X today.

 

It would be very easy to make a case that no man has made a greater imprint on America's most popular sport than John Madden, and that goes far beyond his involvement with the Raiders franchise. Yes, Madden won a Super Bowl title with the Raiders. He famously never had a losing season as their coach and to this day boasts the highest winning percentage among coaches who have coached at least 100 games. But again, summarizing Madden's involvement with the NFL by only discussing his time as the Raiders coach would be doing a disservice to this larger than life presence who personified the notion of living and breathing the game of football well after he retired from coaching.

After his coaching career was over, John Madden became a transcendent color commentator on NFL broadcasts for thirty years — on all four major TV networks that have covered the NFL, nonetheless — a career choice that earned him an incredible and well-deserved sixteen Sports Emmy Awards. Additionally, there is a generation of young football fans who only know the name John Madden because of the Madden NFL video game which has used some combination of his name, likeness, expertise, and commentary since 1988. Madden is the most popular sports video game title ever produced, and the way Madden himself saw it, a way for which people could participate in and learn about the game of football. For all of these remarkable contributions, John Madden was rightfully inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006.

On a personal level, I owe a great deal to John Madden. Like many so many kids have, I grew up playing the video game named after him. And as an adult, I was fortunate enough to be employed by Electronic Arts to work as a writer on that very game for four years.