Guest Post: John Madden on retiring

SeriouslyGuys is excited to receive our first guest post since Jay Leno’s writers back in 2008: John Madden. Mr. Madden wanted to talk about his retirement from football announcing and what this means for the sport, viewers, himself and Monday nights.

Hi, John Madden here. If you picked up an Internet news site today, then you probably already know that I gave a press conference, in which I told the press that I’m retiring from announcing football games for television.

Now, in order to retire from announcing football games for television, that means I have to stop doing programs like Monday Night Football. The key step here is to prevent myself from going to the games, putting on makeup and sitting in front of the cameras and microphone in the broadcasting booth. Also, I’m not really retired if I make any play-by-play calls while wearing a lapel microphone. Those count, too, you know.

So, this retirement means that viewers will no longer see and/or hear me calling the plays during the game, which is where I watch the game with you and tell you what’s happened. At this point, the viewers will have no choice but listen to and watch someone else, who will do what I’ve just described — but with a different voice.

What does this mean for me? I’ll tell you what this means: I’ll have to watch football like a normal man, which means I will drive my friends and family insane by describing every action in the game to them like I would on television. But remember, I won’t be on television. Unless I get one of those video camera/TV displays from Sears. Then I’ll be on TV, but on a separate one from the game or on picture-in-picture (PIP).

Also, I won’t be able to do the scribble arrows thing anymore without a dry erase marker.

This retirement from all football game announcing means that I will also no longer appear on Monday Night Football. This is because the Monday night game is still a football game, only on a Monday night instead of a Sunday afternoon or night, Saturday night or the occasional Tuesday or Thursday night game.

In closing, this means that I will no longer be paid by NBC to talk about the plays during the game, which must occur for it to be considered a game or there’s a penalty for delay of game. (That’s when a team delays the game by failing to commence a play before the play clock reaches 0.)

Good night, unless it’s not night where you are, in which case, the sun is still up or it is not after 5 pm.