Wham!

"Madden made for an inadvertently comic professor. He was about 270 pounds and highly excitable, given to windmilling arms and spontaneous eruptions of onomatopoeia (wham!).

Teaching football, he discovered, was as delicate an art as teaching calculus or advanced aeronautics. Football had so many moving parts, so much more complexity than baseball. Madden told me recently that as he introduced his students to arcane concepts like the nickel defense or presnap shifts, he watched to see whether they would wilt under the strain.

'I wanted to see at what point I lost'em,' he says. But as Madden drew concepts on the chalkboard and repeated phrases like a patient head coach ('This is man coverage'), the students caught on, allowing Madden to add layer upon layer of detail. By semester's end, Madden had created an army of mini-Don Coryells, and learned the lesson that has informed just about everything he has done since: that fans have a capacity for footballic knowledge, for the wonders of x's and o's, that goes far beyond what they see on television."
-Summa Cum Madden-