John Madden's Disease

Does John Madden really say anything? I don't mean ever -- he always has interesting thoughts on football, as here, where he talks about what it was like to coach a lot of characters on the Oakland team:

 When a character would come in, he didn't lead the band; the band was being led by pretty solid guys. You had that. It was just a break in the monotony. Ted Hendricks was probably the biggest combination of a guy that was a character, great player, Hall of Famer. You don't want characters just because they're characters - 'Boy, I got a whole bunch of characters, none of them can play football, but they're funnier than hell.' I got Ted Hendricks, who was a great player, a Hall of Fame player, now he's a character. I liked that, too.

I mean when he's doing a football game. Before the Indianapolis-San Diego game last night, Al Michaels asked him what San Diego had to do to win. Well, Madden said, the first thing was that the quarterback had to have a good night. And he had to have support from his receivers and the line. But a good offense wouldn't be enough, because Indianapolis had so many weapons, so the defense had to have a really good game, too, and they especially needed to penetrate so they could get to Peyton Manning. And in the end, that might not be enough, either, so the special teams had to be sharp, too. He talked, I swear, for three minutes, and what he basically said was: For San Diego to win, the offense, defense and special teams have to play well. At least he didn't say, and they have to score the most points.

I think we all suffer from John Madden's Disease from time to time, especially when we're in territory so familiar to us. I've felt a twinge of it when doing my 20th blog post on illegal immigration or my hundredth editorial on fiscal restraint. What the hell did I just use 700 words to say? That if the federal government is serious about budget deficits, it has to spend less? Brilliant! But probably more than half of the talk we do in day-to-day life is like that, too. Blah, blah, blah the weather. Blah, blah, blah, my co-worker. Blah, blah, blah, this town sure has changed. Makes me occasionally want to blurt out something inappropriate or out of context just to see if people are paying attention enough to wish to have a real conversation.

Jimi Hendrix rocked, but Jim Morrison died at about the right age!