Hall of Fame coach John Madden has had a rough year, battling plenty of health issues. He recently resurfaced to do a podcast with the Bay Area News Group, and he still sounds like the same self-aware, plainspoken, entertaining man he’s always been.
Consider this quintessential Coach Madden quip: “I’m still not sure what a podcast is. Anyone who listens to this and says: ‘That guy sounds like he doesn’t know what the heck he’s doing.’ You’re right.”
Madden also thinks the NFL doesn’t know what it’s doing by staging short-week games every week of the season.
“Something has to be done about Thursday Night Football,” Madden said. “It just doesn’t work. It’s not only a fan thing, it’s a team thing. It’s a safety thing. It’s a competitive thing. It doesn’t work. I know about money, and I know about business. Maybe you have to tweak stuff a little more. To help teams, maybe you get a bye the week before.”
Madden has a specific problem with the scheduling of this week’s Thursday games.
“On Thanksgiving, Washington has to travel to Dallas to play in Dallas, and they played Sunday night,” Madden said. “That’s wrong. That’s an oops. You play a team on Sunday night and make them travel and play on Thursday. I remember in my coaching days, as players get older, it takes them longer to heal up from a Sunday game, and guys weren’t ready to play until Thursday or Friday.”
It’s one thing for fans or media types who write crap you shouldn’t waste your time reading to question Thursday Night Football; it’s quite another for John Madden to do it -- especially since he remains a very influential voice for the NFL. But he apparently doesn’t have the influence he’d like to have, losing in the rigged game of rock-scissors-paper that coin always wins.