THIRTY YEARS AGO NO ONE KNEW WHAT A PULLING GUARD WAS:

John Madden Made Us Smarter (LEONARD CASSUTO, 4/20/09, WSJ)

Mr. Madden is a transformational figure in the history of entertainment. He changed the way that we watch television and the way we think about sports.

From an unlikely perch in the broadcast booth, Mr. Madden has been serving as America's teacher. Using complex diagrams and -- dare I say it? -- intellectual explanations, Mr. Madden gave the average fan credit for wanting to know more than just who caught the ball. His memorable turns of phrase ("boom!") have given whimsical cover to the real work he's done making his students -- anyone who watches sports -- better, more alert, more knowledgeable viewers. [...]

[I]t was Mr. Madden as cerebral coach who made his most lasting mark. What did the key block look like that sprung the runner for a touchdown run? Where was the seam in the zone defense that allowed the receiver to catch the pass? Mr. Madden was a fount of deep and complex instruction, using state-of-the-art computer graphics, scribbling circles and arrows into a freeze frame, to illustrate his lengthy explanations.

This kind of analysis had been thought too complicated for the average fan, but Mr. Madden showed that fans not only tolerated that level of depth, but actively wanted it. His example quickly spread across televised sports during the 1980s.

Mike Fratello, the NBA's first "Czar of the Telestrator," simply borrowed Mr. Madden's diagramming techniques and applied them to basketball, where they remain a staple of coach-centric analysis. Baseball announcing on television once relied almost solely on chatter about the batter's hometown of little old Altoona, Pa., and other such remarks. After Mr. Madden, baseball announcers embraced the technical and statistical aspects of the play on the field. Tim McCarver was the first to employ in-depth explanations of fielder positioning, pitch sequences, and other strategies. Now all serious baseball announcers do those things.

They do them because Mr. Madden raised the intelligence level of sports announcing. A whole generation of TV viewers has grown up on the most rigorously analytical play-by-play announcing in the long history of sports. It's not too much to believe that for once, television is making them smarter.