BSR Grand Prix

Who is John Madden, and why his name on a game?

Who is this John Madden, and why does he have a game with his name on it? If you don't know the answer to the first question, you may want to take up a different sport. John Madden earned his fame as a sometimes-outrageous coach of the Oakland Raiders and then moved on to become a sometimes-outrageous football commentator on national television. He also has co-written with Dave Anderson a series of sometimes-outrageous books about his views on football and all sorts of other things. The tiles of these books are "Hey, Wait a minute (I wrote a book), and ONE KNEE EQUALS TWO FEET (And Everything Else You Need To Know About Football).

Recognized as one of the pre-eminent authorities on football, Super Bowl-winner John Madden brings over 30 years of coaching and commentating experience to his association with Electronic Arts. After a knee injury ended his NFL playing career before it began, he moved into coaching in the early 1960s. He spent several years coaching at the junior college and college levels, and in 1967, Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis tabbed Madden as an assistant for his AFL franchise. Two years later, at the tender age of 32, Madden was named the Raiders' head coach, and stayed on with the team for 10 years, compiling a fine .750 winning percentage in that time. Madden reached the 100-win plateau faster than any coach in NFL history had to that point, and picked up a World Championship along the way as the Raiders dropped the Vikings 32-14 in Super Bowl XI in 1976. At the start of the 1993-94 season, John Madden is listed in the NFL* record books as the coach with the 19th highest number of regular season wins, which doesn't sound all that impressive until you consider that he only coached for 10 years. Names above him on the list include George Halas who led the Chicago Bears for 40 years, Don Shula and 7 other coaches with 20 or more years.

But if you consider John Madden's career in terms of winning percentage, he is the winningest coach in the league. He also is 1-0 in the Super Bowl.

Here's a list of coaches that are ranked by regular season winning percentages:

John Madden..........750
George Allen...........705
Don Shula................686
Joe Gibbs.................674
George Halas...........671
Curly Lambeau.......624
Paul Brown..............621
Bud Grant................620
Tom Landry.............605
Steve Owen..............595
Chuck Nox...............588
Buddy Parker..........577
Don Coryell..............572
Hank Stram..............571
Chuck Noll...............566
Sid Gilman...............550
Weeb Ewbank..........502

Madden retired from coaching after two more seasons and moved on to the broadcast booth, where he quickly gained notoriety for his boisterous sometimes corky sound effects, often punctuating his color commentary with a "boom!" or a "bam!". At the same time, however, Madden offered insights into the game of football not often heard from the announcers of the time. His combination of a colorful personality and deep knowledge of the game has helped Madden to garner 11 Emmy awards for outstanding sports broadcasting since his announcing career began two decades ago.

Madden can still be heard on NFL Sundays on FOX-TV, where he teams with his longtime 19 year announcing partner Pat Summerall to bring nationwide audiences the action from one of the top games each week. In a business that is now used to annual releases of franchise sports product, it is hard to remember the landscape prior to the introduction of the Madden series. Conventional wisdom at the time was that you could only sell one version of a sports game to the consumer, and anyone who suggested multiple yearly iterations of a product would have been laughed out of town. Celebrity endorsements were also a rarity, with only the very biggest stars, such as Magic Johnson, commanding any kind of interest. And forget about official licenses from major sporting entities. The leagues were inflexible in their demands, asking for huge percentages of the money generated and for guarantees that were out of proportion to the marketplace potential. He was popular as a product spokesperson, most notably in a series of commercials for Miller beer in which he parodied his own reputation by bursting through walls and doors. Truth be told, Madden was a strange person to pick to launch a football franchise. Legend has it that EA CEO Trip Hawkins had to track Madden down in a parking lot to make the pitch to him about the product line. Obviously, Hawkins was successful, and the first Madden game appeared on the Apple II in 1989. True to his reputation, the box cover had Madden bursting through a chalkboard. In 1990, the legendary Scott Orr brought John Madden Football to the Genesis. Whether the team knew it was making history is debatable, but one thing is certain - it had started the greatest sports franchise in the history of home console gaming. Madden also consults with EA SPORTS on his best-selling video game franchise, which reaches new heights each and every year, also multiple releases, PS2, PS1, N64, GAMECUBE, PC, and XBOX and both he and Summerall lend their voice talents to the game.

These are the names of the people that produced this great game: the programmers, producers, artist and administrators of Madden NFL 2002. I'm pretty sure that they hold the key to something here that we all want. So here is what I did: I drafted everyone in the draft that had their last names. So far they end up being pretty average, but Pat Summerall says some of their names.

I put stars next to the ones that I've heard. Its pretty cool.