John Madden

Coach / TV Personality

John Madden coached the Oakland Raiders to victory in Super Bowl XI and went on to become one of America's best-known (and most enthusiastic) football announcers. Madden began coaching after an aborted career as a professional football player -- he was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles, but never made the active roster because of an early knee injury. He had short stints coaching in California at Hancock Junior College (1960-64) and San Diego State (1964-66) before landing a job as an assistant with the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League in 1967. Madden became head coach in 1969 and stayed in the job through the 1978 season. His Raiders won Super Bowl XI in 1977, defeating the Minnesota Vikings by a score of 32-14. Madden's overall record with the Raiders was 103-32-7, giving him the highest winning percentage of any NFL coach (just edging out legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, whose lifetime record was 105-35-6). In 1980 Madden turned his talents to broadcasting, and since then has been a color commentator for CBS, Fox and ABC, known for his eager exclamations and goofy sense of humor. (In 2005 NBC announced it had hired Madden, giving him a clean sweep of the major networks.) Madden's amiable personality led to a career beyond the arena of football; he has published several books, appeared in dozens of television commercials (most famously for Miller beer) and has lent his name to one of the most popular video games in the U.S., Madden Football.

Extra credit: Madden has won more than a dozen Emmys for his work as a sports commentator... Madden famously hates to fly in airplanes and travels from coast to coast in a custom-built bus known as the Madden Cruiser... He is not the same John Madden who directed the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love.

Other greats of American professional football include Steve Young, Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas.