Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00And dibs, the guys are live, remembering the great John Madden from his studio in Pleasanton.
00:09Yeah, we sure are. We're in a fascinating spot today.
00:13What a fun, unique deal we've got going on out here at the Madden Compound
00:18as we celebrate the release of the book Mornings with Madden,
00:21but also celebrate John and get to do it with incredibly interesting people,
00:25including the person sitting right here in front of us right now
00:28on the River Islands guest line, joining us, Mooch, Steve Mariucci.
00:32Hey, how you doing?
00:33I'm doing great. It's good to be over here. This is going to be a lot of fun tonight.
00:36This is going to be a lot of fun. What are you looking forward to most?
00:39I don't know. I'm just seeing the family, looking around this museum.
00:44That's what this is, right? And talking about John Madden, I'm sure we're going to have some laughs.
00:49No doubt. And when you think about John Madden, the first time that you encountered John Madden
00:55or your history with John Madden, because everybody is intertwined with John in football
01:00and in the Bay Area, actually. So is there a moment where you remember meeting him
01:05or being touched by him that you want to share?
01:08Well, obviously, our first exposure to him was listening.
01:13Well, as a coach, I knew of him as a great coach.
01:17But then for so many years, he was so good in the booth.
01:22And I've watched eight bazillion football games as a kid growing up with my mom and dad.
01:27And he became everybody's favorite in the booth.
01:31And so when I started coaching, sooner or later, I knew I was going to have John Madden do one of our games.
01:38And the biggest memory, the thing that puts a smile on my face is when he came out to Green Bay
01:47and I was coaching the Niners.
01:49Because as an assistant, you don't get to talk to John Madden.
01:52You got to be the head coach, right? Or you got to be Reggie White or Brett Favre, the star, right?
01:57Assistants never get to even shake his hand.
02:00So when I was the head coach of the Niners, we played at Green Bay.
02:06And that's where I grew up back there.
02:10I'm not a cheesehead, but pretty darn close.
02:12I grew up in Iron Mountain, right on the border of Wisconsin, but I grew up a Packer fan.
02:16And my family came down and this and that, and I had a lot of people come.
02:20But John and I first really met then, and I was the head coach.
02:25And we had the production meeting.
02:27Usually you do it in the green room or in a room in the hotel.
02:31Well, we did it on this bus.
02:33And it became a little bit different kind of a production meeting because it was like,
02:39Hey, Mooch, why don't you show me around town here?
02:42I go, come on, let's go.
02:43So we were talking a little bit about the game, but more about, okay, let's turn over here.
02:48There's Mike Holmgren's house.
02:49Okay, that's right.
02:50Come on, show me where Favre lives.
02:52We tried the bus over there.
02:54There's where Brett Favre lived.
02:55And come on to my cul-de-sac.
02:57So we drove up the cul-de-sac where I lived, and I'm going, okay, so that's my house on the end of the cul-de-sac right there.
03:03And this is Jekylla's house, and this is Safranski's, and that's the Olsen's, and that's where I lived right there.
03:09And all of a sudden, eight bazillion kids come running out because now there's Madden's bus on the cul-de-sac where the kids play street hockey.
03:19And the kids are going, hey, Madden, hey, Madden.
03:22And you've seen that before.
03:24And so that was our first encounter of a production meeting was driving around Green Bay's neighborhoods and just fending off all the kids.
03:34Then the next time it happened, well, we did it again, but I said, next time we do this, I've got to have my mom bring some pasties down.
03:43You know what pasties are?
03:45Let our listeners know.
03:47Well, come on.
03:48So back in Michigan.
03:49Come on, people.
03:50Back in the mines.
03:51Cornish pasties.
03:54Instead of a sandwich, you know, we make bologna sandwiches now.
03:58Pasties have meat and potatoes and carrots, and it's a pastry, and it's awesome, and it's really good for you.
04:07And they would bring those down in their lunch bucket down in the mines, okay?
04:11It was very good eating.
04:13Anyway, so my mom brought a bunch of pasties down for everybody on the bus, and it was like a feast.
04:19And it was like, make sure you have enough ketchup.
04:22So it became kind of a thing that we would ride around in his bus and have the production meeting eating pasties, looking around town.
04:28I've never heard of a progressive production meeting.
04:33Did he do this with other coaches, or was this just a youth thing?
04:36I don't know what he did with other coaches, but I know he didn't get pasties from any other coaches because my mom brought them down.
04:44So good.
04:45Oh, that's awesome.
04:47The Madden Cruiser.
04:48I mean, it was just like that whole thing in and of itself became so iconic.
04:52I ran into it one time as a kid out on Highway 5.
04:56We stopped at Harris Ranch, and there was the Madden Cruiser in the parking lot, and he was leaving Harris Ranch, and he's walking through the parking lot.
05:05It just reminded me of that because you said the way the kids, I mean, it's like the Pied Piper, like everybody just running toward the guy.
05:11Well, it's not like everybody had a bus, and so they knew who it was.
05:17That's one of my regrets, and I've known John now a long time, and I rode on the bus and all of that, but I never had a chance to ride across the country on that bus and stop at all those diners and all those small town restaurants and cafes.
05:36That would have been awesome.
05:39I would have slept on the floor just to do that.
05:41Yeah, no doubt.
05:42Just the idea of John at that time, and a lot of our listeners, and I'm looking at our director of sports, Lucas, who's barely in his early 30s and probably not old enough to remember those times.
05:52Did he know he had a bus?
05:54I don't even know if he – at the time, it was Madden and Summerall, and John didn't fly, and so he traveled on the bus, but when John Madden and Pat Summerall were calling your game as a coach,
06:05you had to feel a little bit of an extra import in a regular season game more so than now where, yeah, you get your A crew for Fox or you get your A crew this and that on Sunday and Thursday and Monday.
06:16There was so much football, but the Madden-Summerall vibe as a coach, that had to give you a little extra feel.
06:23Yes, and when you had them, you knew it was a big game, right?
06:28They didn't – they were assigned the big games, and so it was fun in the – they were different.
06:36Every network and their personnel are different when they interview you in a production meeting about the game and about who's hurt and about this and about that guy, and of course, John had his own style.
06:50Pat Summerall was awesome, but you just knew how – a couple of things.
06:56You knew how intelligent John was by the questions he asked you, but – and you knew that he was prepared, that he watched a lot of film, and then – but you also knew that he was there for having some fun and getting to know you and getting to know the person, and that's where he was so good is he gave a darn about people and their background and their families and all of that.
07:18All of those things.
07:19The Terrell Owens catch game.
07:22He did that game.
07:24Do you remember any specific interactions in the bigger games that he did that you were a part of?
07:32Was it always before the game?
07:34Was there ever anything after the game?
07:36I never saw him after the game.
07:39I think when he got done with the booth, he probably tried to hightail it out of there.
07:44Yeah, right.
07:45And then we were in the locker room and then going to the press conferences.
07:49Never really saw him.
07:50We'd see him before the game because he'd always come to practice.
07:54He'd come in with his tennis shoes on, his khaki pants and that big shirt hanging out, and then he would be watching practice and asking you questions about this guy and that guy and whatnot.
08:07We do those production meetings on Zoom right now, and sometimes the guys watch practice, sometimes they don't, but he was very thorough.
08:18He always liked going to practice.
08:20Of course, he was on the road for six months.
08:22He had time to go to practice.
08:24Steve Mariucci with us here on Willard & Dibbs, and we're at the Madden compound.
08:28I was thinking about this game this weekend.
08:31Madden would be doing this if he were still broadcasting.
08:33Which game?
08:34One of the Niners and Chiefs coming up this weekend, and we were talking earlier about what we perceive, at least, as a little bit of a mental disadvantage that the Niners are trying to overcome because the Chiefs have had their number.
08:47Is that something that people just make up?
08:49Have you ever experienced that as a coach where you felt like your team kind of had something else that they needed to get over because they've struggled against a certain opponent?
08:59Yeah, when I was an assistant in Green Bay coaching the quarterbacks, Brett Favre was there, and Brett was one of John's favorite guys.
09:08A couple times, we played in the playoffs, a couple times on Thanksgiving, and a couple times just down there.
09:16Six times in a row, we played the Cowboys down in Dallas.
09:20It was weird scheduling, okay?
09:22Coincidental, but it was – and they beat us.
09:25They just kept beating us.
09:26We were young.
09:27In 1995, in fact, the last time the Dallas Cowboys were in the NFC Championship game with Michael Urban, the triplets, Urban, Aikman, and Emmitt Smith, Deion Sanders played wide receiver in that game.
09:41I was coaching on the Packers, right?
09:44John Madden's doing the game, of course.
09:46Gosh, one of our coaches got run over.
09:49Gil Haskell hit his head on the side, went into a coma, had to stay in Dallas for a while.
09:54But it was one of those, we have to get over this hurdle or we're never going to get anywhere.
10:00And then the next year, the next year, the teams met up, and finally the Packers beat the Cowboys.
10:05But it was one of those things where it's like, are we ever going to beat these guys?
10:09Is that more of a fan creation or is that something that actually matriculates into the locker room and the coaches and the players?
10:15Because we're kind of going through it here as broadcasters and fans with this whole Chiefs thing.
10:21It depends on which guys you're talking to because there's a lot of new guys that didn't experience all those losses or those Super Bowl losses, right?
10:28There's some new kids that just really don't care about that, right?
10:31But the coaches that were there, the players that were there, you're talking about different quarterbacks and a lot of different supporting cast here.
10:40So I suppose they're aware of it, but I don't know if they let it haunt them.
10:44How do you see this matchup right now based on its recent history?
10:49Well, yeah. Forget the recent history, really.
10:52This is a new game, new teams, basically.
10:56Yeah, they have Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid, and Andy was one of the coaches that was coaching with us in Green Bay.
11:03He and I shared an office because we ran out of office space, so they shoved us in the same little room.
11:08Anyway, the 49ers are the best 3-3 team that this league's ever seen, right?
11:18I mean, they're very good. They're very talented.
11:21And when they have their guys healthy, and I don't know if Christian McCaffrey's coming back or when, who knows, right?
11:28They are still very, very good and very, very physical.
11:34So this game is going to be an important one.
11:38This game is going to be one that would get them over the hump or the hurdle, that mental hurdle you're talking about.
11:45You know, Debo Samuels, he's kind of like a twin to Christian McCaffrey.
11:50They both can do everything, right?
11:52They can play receiver, slot, running back, return kicks if need be, whatever that is.
11:57And when they're both on the field at the same time, it's like, how do you match up, you know?
12:02But with Kittle and Jawan Jennings and Iyuk and Jordan Mason, how's he feeling?
12:10Do you know? Have you heard today?
12:12Still in the blue jersey, so he's trending in the right direction.
12:15He's trending. In Brockport, he's very, very good.
12:18So this ought to be a good game, and the Chiefs are for real.
12:22I love watching Patrick Mahomes play. He's the magic man.
12:25I mean, he's as special as we've ever seen.
12:29I'm sure John would really love him.
12:31Yeah, and doing it this year without really much of a run game and without any real wide receiver.
12:37He's doing it with a lot of tight ends.
12:39Yeah, just win differently.
12:41Yeah, win differently.
12:42And I think about Kyle Shanahan as kind of a parallel to your time with the Niners
12:46because you were really successful, but you didn't quite get over the hump.
12:50And Kyle so far has been really successful and hasn't gotten over the hump.
12:54And what is it like as a coach when you're knocking on that door,
12:57but you're not able to really just push through it?
13:00Trust me, you'd rather be that coach or that team that's knocking on the door every year
13:06than a team that is awful and doesn't have that kind of pressure.
13:10Can't find the door.
13:11Yeah, so he's right there. This team is right there.
13:17It's about finishing games, having a good fourth quarter, putting a good drive together.
13:22They're so darn close.
13:24And if they can stay healthy, like I said earlier, they're going to be right there again.
13:28Do you see a parallel?
13:30I think we forget that you had spent some time on the same staff with Andy Reid.
13:36In this town, Kyle now gets compared a lot to Andy in Philly.
13:41In other words, like you're really good, you're knocking on the door a lot,
13:45but frustration boils because you can't get that last one.
13:48No one thinks about that with Andy anymore because now he's with the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes
13:52and they're the big dogs.
13:54Do you see parallels to Andy in Philly and Kyle now?
13:58I hope not because Andy got let go in Philly and then he had to resurface someplace else.
14:03I can't imagine Kyle getting let go.
14:06So I hope that's just a – maybe that sounds like there's some similarities there right now,
14:14but Kyle's still a good young coach and he's got a lot more wins coming up.
14:19Yeah, and the track record would be the thing,
14:21and hopefully he doesn't have to wait as long as Andy to get his Super Bowl
14:24because that would be another six years here for Kyle in San Francisco before going elsewhere.
14:30When you watch the Niners play,
14:32it seems to me that they play differently than a lot of other teams with the use of the fullback
14:36and they love their tight end and the rest of it.
14:38What do you make of the Niners and the way they go about their offense?
14:41It's old school.
14:42It's old school football and you mentioned the use of a fullback.
14:45Half the teams don't have a fullback.
14:47Right.
14:48And so the fullback is a dinosaur.
14:51They don't use them in colleges either anymore.
14:54They're always in shotgun and spread and three and four wide, sometimes more.
14:58The fullback is like, who?
15:00What?
15:01And so I love the teams that establish the ground game.
15:06And I've said this before, though, the tight ends, the tight end position now,
15:11which is extremely underpaid, is maybe, other than quarterback,
15:15maybe the most difficult position or more demanding position in football
15:20because they're having to teach these guys to put their hand on the ground
15:24and block right next to a tackle in line and then play it in a slot
15:27and then play receiver and then come on in and play you or fullback
15:31and all those protections and all those routes
15:33and all the different things that they're having to, I don't know,
15:35how they practice or meet with these tight ends.
15:37They're doing so many things.
15:38They're replacing that fullback that the team doesn't have.
15:41And so the Niners have a great one in Kittle.
15:45And, of course, Travis Kelsey is the other great one,
15:47and there's a handful of them right now,
15:49and they're extremely underpaid compared to the wide receivers.
15:52Well, yeah, that's an interesting comment.
15:54Steve Mariucci joining us on Willard and Dibbs,
15:57and I was going to compare it to the wide receiver.
16:00It sounds like you're saying that the wide receiver position is overpaid.
16:04Did I say that?
16:05Well, that's right.
16:06They've got guys making $35 million a year, you know,
16:09and then they'll catch four balls in a game and, you know, that kind of thing,
16:13and they hardly block.
16:15You've got to have great ones, absolutely.
16:19But what I'm saying is that the tight end is a little bit underappreciated.
16:23And then what we have, you know, we've felt that way with running backs too.
16:27Why do you need to draft one in the first round
16:29when you get all these other kids that are in fifth, sixth, seventh round
16:32playing very well, right, making peanuts,
16:35and so maybe you don't need to draft a running back that early
16:38unless there's a great one there.
16:40But the tight end position is becoming, if you can get one,
16:45and I had Tony Gonzalez at Cal,
16:48and then, of course, he went over to Kansas City and Atlanta
16:52and now is in the Hall of Fame.
16:54Those kinds of guys, man, if they can block and if they can play receiver,
16:59it's a matchup nightmare.
17:02What do you do?
17:03If you were the defensive coordinator, how do you cover a guy like that?
17:06With a linebacker, not fast enough.
17:08With a corner, not big enough.
17:10A safety, not fast enough.
17:12I don't know, double them.
17:13You know, it's just a problem.
17:15It's funny you say that because I was watching tape
17:17from the New Orleans game with Kansas City,
17:19and Travis Kelsey actually received the snap out of the pistol and run.
17:23He was a quarterback, you know, in high school.
17:25Oh, I didn't know that.
17:26It looked like it because he ran the read option with Xavier Worthy
17:29and Mahomes was behind him, and so Andy's got all kinds of toys.
17:33Andy's nuts, you know, and he lets his guys.
17:38He was really close with John.
17:40They were on the competition committee together and this and that.
17:44He lets his players, because when you're good,
17:46you can kind of do whatever you want,
17:48but he lets his players suggest new little wrinkles and new plays
17:52and new fun things, right?
17:54And I'm not kidding.
17:55When I go there and watch them practice, they're practicing that stuff
17:59and they're laughing and they're having fun and they're throwing underhand
18:02and they got a bag of tricks, man.
18:05And you can be assured that one of them is coming out in the first half
18:08against the Niners.
18:10Well, we were talking about that earlier.
18:12That kind of comes with the resume they have, right?
18:14You can afford to play it loose and try some things
18:18and people won't criticize you, and that feels like that's present
18:21in this matchup because the Niners have all this angst
18:25with the way it's gone with these two teams.
18:27I know it.
18:28You know, the other team that's starting to play like the Chiefs on offense
18:31or the Detroit Lions, they're starting to do all that.
18:34They're very good to get down and throw,
18:36and then now they're mixing in the goofy stuff, the fun stuff, the laterals,
18:41all that different thing, and fans love it, players love it.
18:45And even if it doesn't work once in a while, you know,
18:47you still got that little, like, just going to keep doing this stuff.
18:50And how important is that inside the locker room to have a team
18:54that knows that you might pull some of that out?
18:57We talked about last year Kansas City doing the ring around the Rosie
19:00where they break the huddle and they're all running in circles.
19:04Does that stuff, like even if the play doesn't work,
19:07does that help your overall culture knowing that a player
19:10can raise his hand and say, hey, coach, let's try this?
19:12No, I don't think that every time there's a suggestion,
19:15the coach runs the play, okay?
19:16Right.
19:17But, yeah, can you imagine the defense standing there
19:20watching the offense practice that in the indoor facility?
19:24Like, okay, let's get this ring around the Rosie, right, guys?
19:28But they give it some importance.
19:32You mentioned earlier that for the 49ers it's about finishing,
19:36it's about that fourth quarter.
19:38What do you see?
19:39Is there an issue there or is it circumstance?
19:42What do you see if there are even those fourth quarter struggles?
19:47Yeah.
19:48So as a coach, you just shake your head and just kind of brainstorm
19:54as to what it could be, okay?
19:56So we know we have these losses that we failed in the fourth quarter,
20:01whether it was Kyle back in Atlanta in the Super Bowl
20:04or wherever the big games are, you didn't hang on to a lead, okay?
20:09So then you start going, all right, we're going to do a research on this
20:12and we're going to try to find out what it is.
20:14Is it a fumble here?
20:15Is it a penalty there?
20:16Is it a defense giving up a big play?
20:19Is it our conditioning?
20:21Are we getting tired?
20:22Is it what we're eating?
20:23Do we stretch?
20:25Are we getting guys hurt during games?
20:26And I think if you do the research,
20:28you'll find that they have a multitude of reasons why they've lost.
20:33There's no one thing that says, yeah, this is it.
20:36This is why we lost all those close games at the end.
20:39It's a different reason every game.
20:41And so you just got to keep swinging
20:43and hope that another reason doesn't show up at the end.
20:46Incidentally, as we bring it full circle,
20:48John Madden is number one all time in winning percentage in games
20:53settled by seven points or less.
20:55Somebody shared that stat earlier.
20:57I think he was 700% or 70% winning percentage.
21:01But just for our audience, your memories of John as a coach,
21:05because I was a very young kid in the Bay Area
21:08watching the Oakland Raiders in the 70s,
21:10but what he did as a coach I think sometimes gets overlooked
21:13based on all of the other Madden stuff.
21:16Yeah, he was young.
21:19He was big.
21:21He was animated.
21:23He let his players play.
21:26He had some characters on his team.
21:28He didn't have a bunch of choir boys.
21:30He had these characters on his team, and he let them be themselves,
21:35just like John was going to be himself.
21:38Great rivals with Steelers back in the 70s.
21:43The AFC was fun to watch.
21:48I was shocked that John didn't keep coaching.
21:51I thought for sure he'd just stick around and keep winning
21:54and chase Shula's record.
21:57I don't know.
22:00He got tired, and obviously he had other things that he could do.
22:05Sure did.
22:07Do you ever play Madden, and are you any good at it?
22:12You know what?
22:15It's funny because we've had this conversation.
22:17Are you any good at it?
22:19No, I'm not.
22:20No, I'm not.
22:22It's like when you get beat by a little kid, you go,
22:26I'm not going to do this much more.
22:31There's too many buttons, Coach.
22:34Do you know what the A button does?
22:36Do you know what that does on the Madden game?
22:38No, I don't know.
22:39How would I know that?
22:40You're a coach.
22:41You're supposed to know, Coach.
22:42Come on, Coach.
22:44It's great to see you.
22:45Thanks for coming and hanging out with us.
22:47Good luck tonight.
22:49Good luck.
22:50What are we doing?
22:51Nobody knows.
22:52It's like the A button.
22:53We're going to eat some M&M's right here.
22:55All right, guys, thanks.
22:57We'll react to all of that.
22:58Steve Mariucci here on Wheel of Mentality.