A biography for John Maddenhasn’t been written yet.
“Don't worry about the horse being blind, just load the wagon.”
“When people watch football, they're looking for fun things.”
“I was a coach, and I put a lot of education and experience into coaching.”
“Any time you get a new running back, whether it's a rookie or hasn't played a lot, that's the first thing you test, is their pass protection. That's big.”
“A consulting position might work in another profession, but not in pro football. There's no such thing. They give a guy a parking spot and put his name up as a consultant, and in six months, they erase the name.”
“That's the biggest gap in sports, the difference between the winner and the loser of the Super Bowl.”
“We need to let the referee's sole thing be to protect the quarterback and get those late hits out of there. They even have a stat on television that says 'knockdowns.' Knockdowns means that you knock him down after he throws the ball. The assumption is, if it's legal, we'll make excuses for them.”
“Football isn't nuclear physics, but it's not so simple that you can make it simple. It takes some explaining to get it across.”
“Since 1981, I've spent every Thanksgiving Day broadcasting a game, and it is one of my favorite days. You can say, 'Woe is me, I never get to be part of the tradition,' or you can say, 'Heck, we've got our own tradition, and it's pretty good.'”
“You got one guy going boom, one guy going whack, and one guy not getting in the endzone.”
“I was introduced to the Turducken in New Orleans. And it wasn't Thanksgiving. Glenn at the Gourmet Butcher Block brought it by, and I had never heard of it or had seen one, and they put it in the booth, and it smelled so good that I had to taste it. And it was good. Then Thanksgiving came, and we got one in addition to the traditional turkey.”
“If you play the video game, you become more interested and you want to know more about it. You want to read as much about it as you can, see it live and watch as many games as you can. If you're the type who wants to be as involved as you can in the sport, you're probably going to want to play 'Madden NFL.'”
“Nobody, not even the head coach, would do anything to the football unilaterally, such as adjust the amount of pressure in a ball, without the quarterback not knowing. It would have to be the quarterback's idea.”
“One of the biggest gaps in sports is the difference between the winning and losing teams of the Super Bowl. They don't invite the losing team to the White House. They don't have parades for them. They don't throw confetti on them.”
“If you think about it, I've never held a job in my life. I went from being an NFL player to a coach to a broadcaster. I haven't worked a day in my life.”
“Sometimes you can be one of the best, but you don't accept that if you don't get the ring or win the Super Bowl. There's a lot of good teams between the Super Bowl winner and other teams. Once the Super Bowl is over, we lump everyone into the other 31, and that's not fair.”
“Jim Harbaugh has done a great job of coaching in the NFL no matter how you put it.”
“I'm sure that had I not been a coach, I would have been some form of a teacher.”
“Any defensive coordinator is worried about two things: a running quarterback and a deep ball. You know, don't get beat deep and don't let the quarterback run, because a big part of your defense can't account for the quarterback as a runner, so he gets a free run.”
“When I got out of coaching, I had taught a class at the University of California, an extension class on football for fans. I was looking for tools. I was showing them films. I was going to write a textbook. Trip Hawkins came to me about making it a game for computers.”