Mornings With Madden

My one regret is that I could never change his mind about NFL overtime rules. He truly believed that if you lost the coin flip, you should quit griping and just win the game on defense. Once a linebacker coach, always a linebacker coach, I guess.

Coach was a very clever man who had no problem accepting a basic fact of life: we all do stupid things and we’re all better off if we can laugh at them.

“I’ve always believed that the best teachers were the ‘C’ students because if you’re a ‘C’ student, you can understand ‘C’ students, you can understand average kids, you can teach them. Kind of anyone can teach an ‘A’ student. If you’ve been an ‘A’ student, you can’t understand: ‘How can someone not get it?’ And I think the people that were ‘A’ students, and this is just a generality, I think they tend to become frustrated with people that can’t learn quite as quickly as they did.”

My favorite was the label he applied to quarterback Jeff George, a top NFL draft pick whose career fell short of expectations. “Good hardware, bad software” was the Madden assessment.