The official name of it is the “coaches subcommittee,” and anything you find from the NFL will officially list it as such, but you wouldn’t know that talking to the men who served on it.
To them, it was the Madden committee.
John Madden chaired it, and every last coach in the group cherished being a part of it, so that’s how they referred to it. They did that in reverence to Madden. They did that out of pride for their opportunity to work with him. They did that, most of all, because it really was his group.
“One hundred percent,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said Tuesday night. “I probably wouldn’t have even done it, except it was the Madden committee, and Andy [Reid] was on it. For me, Andy was a big part of it. But beyond that, it was like, it’s . You can’t say no to John Madden. And then once you got on there, he was like the mother goose with her ducklings. Like he’d be walking into the room, and then we’d all be waddling in behind him, all five or six of us.
“We had it all organized: . He had it all strategized out like a game plan, and we’d walk in and try to do our role and not screw it up for him, you know?
“And if anybody ever asks, I do say, .”
Madden died Tuesday morning at 85, and he left a rich and diverse legacy in the sport of football. My generation grew up with him on TV, seeing him and Pat Summerall as the standard bearers for football broadcasting, and watching the two call every big NFC game for CBS through an era in which the NFC won every Super Bowl. My kids identify with Madden through his unparalleled video game franchise.
But very clearly, it was the way in which my dad’s generation saw him—as a coach—that he saw himself. And that much was clear in the work that he did to the very end, with the coaches committee that would informally bear his name, and how its members saw him.
“There was a complete, total reverence for him because of who he was and how much he loved football, and just the way he talked about football,” said ex-Texans coach Bill O’Brien, now offensive coordinator at Alabama. “You could ask him anything. He was an open book. You could say And he would tell you the whole history of it.”
“It was funny because he wanted everything to be like it was our idea,” said Washington coach Ron Rivera. “And yet, you could tell he was the one driving the bus. I mean, he wanted it to be … it was from us. But you could tell, he was orchestrating everything.”
The coaches subcommittee routinely carries eight members, a quarter of the NFL’s head coaches, and those guys cycle on and off as hiring and firing across the league dictates. They weigh in on rules and big picture issues to give the competition committee, and the league as a whole, an idea of where coaches stand on key topics. It’s one of just two committees that’s not chaired by someone employed by the league or a team in an official capacity.
(It’s probably no coincidence that Madden chaired the other such committee, the player safety advisory panel, as well.)
And it’s there, really, where Madden was rolling up his sleeves and carrying out the final phase of his life’s work in football. Madden didn’t need to be doing it, of course. He was midway through his 80s, had accumulated generational wealth through his illustrious career and had every right to be, as most such people would, finishing up life on a beach somewhere with a drink in his hand.
Instead, he’d be yelling with guys like Harbaugh and Rivera and O’Brien over the state of holding calls in the NFL.
“He always inconsistency in holding,” Harbaugh said, laughing. “His basic thing was, either let them hold as much as they want, or don’t let them hold at all. He’s kind of black and white about the rules.”
“He didn’t like the fact, I think, that the rules were kind of ambivalent, that they put too much pressure on the referees to have a definition, to find a definition,” Rivera added. “He just felt like the rules should be clear-cut.”
That was just one of his things.
Another was his hatred of illegal contact downfield, which some found irony in given the way his old Raiders teams played. A big one was his concern on the state of line play. “He loved offensive line——and he wanted to make sure that we were taking care of those guys. … He thought it could be better,” O’Brien said. “He always talked about offensive and defensive line play, how he felt it was deteriorating,” Rivera added.
“He was always really passionate just about every issue,” Harbaugh said. “I mean everything really mattered to him.”
Being in the weeds with the guys on the committee was one way that showed Madden wasn’t just there to take a victory lap as a legend of the game. But it certainly wasn’t the only way he proved to those guys that he cared.
