Madden Is the MVP Again

It was a good day for Mark Rypien and the Washington Redskins, and it was a good day for John Madden and CBS.

Madden was in typical form on Sunday’s Super Bowl. He was outstanding. That is only noteworthy because he is so good at analyzing a football game you have a tendency to take him for granted.

He is equally good whether the game is good or lousy. He is a high-energy guy who doesn’t get on your nerves.

He doesn’t merely pick apart individual plays, he sees the bigger picture. He reflects back and looks ahead. And he puts it all in a language anyone can understand.

When he described the new-fangled CBS blimp cameras hanging above the end zones in the Metrodome, it was in the simplest terms: “That blimp is just a helium balloon. It doesn’t do anything. The camera is the thing. It moves by itself. See it there moving by itself.”

When the Redskins’ Wilber Marshall got a little exuberant in throwing Buffalo receiver Andre Reed out of bounds, Madden’s comment was: “He almost pantsed him.”

Shortly after the Redskins, who were dominating, scored their first touchdown, Madden summed up things nicely by saying, “Controlling the line of scrimmage brings confidence, and confidence brings touchdowns.”

One of his best lines came during the pregame, when he was talking about how nervous players can get. “When I was with the Raiders, Fred Biletnikoff used to always throw up before games. Sometimes we didn’t know if it was Fred or someone calling for Earl.”

Madden isn’t above self-effacement. After Reed was penalized for throwing his helmet when he didn’t get a pass interference call, resulting in a penalty that took the Bills out of field-goal range, Madden said: “No matter how big the game or how emotional the game, you have to keep your emotions under control. Of course, I’m a fine one to talk.”

Madden, it seems, doesn’t get the best Super Bowls to announce. Two years ago, he had to make San Francisco’s 55-10 victory over Denver sound interesting.

Sunday’s Super Bowl didn’t get out of hand quite as early as the one two years ago, but Madden still earned his keep.

Pat Summerall did his usual solid job, but he seemed nervous at times, particularly early on. He stumbled on a few words and somehow even bungled the simplest of names: Kelly. And he once called the Bills the Bulls, although he corrected himself immediately.

Lesley Visser also seemed to have big-game jitters. She had trouble getting it out that Redskin cornerback A.J. Johnson was being examined in the locker room. Visser was smoother covering the Vince Lombardi Trophy presentation after the game.

Summerall committed the most common sin among play-by-play announcers. He didn’t give the score often enough. People at Super Bowl parties aren’t concentrating on the game throughout, and they don’t want to have to wait 10 minutes to hear the score, even if it is 0-0.

The graphics people could help here, too. All the statistics are fine, but don’t forget the score.

Kudos to game producer Bob Stenner and director Sandy Grossman. The coverage was excellent.

Sometimes there is a tendency to get too fancy on big games. But that wasn’t the case on Sunday. Grossman stuck with the basics, and the viewers benefited.

The blimp camera was used tastefully, and only on replays.

All that was missing was a close, exciting game.

It was a long day of football, if you started out at 9 a.m. with ESPN’s Super Bowl edition of “NFL GameDay.”

As pregame shows go, this was about as good as one can be.

A highlight included Joe Theismann’s interview with Joe Gibbs, his former coach.

Theismann noted that Gibbs, who sleeps at Redskins Park three nights a week, sometimes works until 4 or 5 in the morning.

“You’re not really a morning person, are you?” Theismann said.

“Well, not like you,” Gibbs said. “When I make speeches, I always talk about how you were early in the morning--’yak, yak, yak, yak’--and how I’d have to finally say, ‘Will you shut up?’ ”

It was also interesting to hear what qualities Gibbs likes in players: (1) character, (2) be a character, (3) intelligence and (4) ability.

The CBS pregame show was also good, but it had two major flaws. The 2 1/2-hour show was about 1 1/2 hours too long. And there was too much about the Winter Olympics, which CBS will televise next month.

For a while, it seemed this day belonged to figure skating, not football.

Terry Bradshaw’s commentary from the field early in the pregame show was refreshing, but then about everything Bradshaw does is refreshing.

He didn’t pull any punches in his criticism of Jim Kelly at halftime, as other commentators might have, and after the game he said, “In these games, the big names have to come through.”

Bradshaw did as a player, and he also does as a broadcaster.

Greg Gumbel was solid as the host and kept things rolling as well as possible.

The shots from the space shuttle Discovery were interesting, and the crew “coin-tossing” neurologist Roberta Bondar added a different twist.

Reporter Jim Gray handled the story about protests by American Indians in tasteful, balanced fashion, and the feature on the gamblers in Las Vegas was also good.

What we didn’t need was Channel 2, which didn’t even have its usual postgame show, assigning reporter Dave Lopez to ask patrons at the Legends sports bar in Long Beach if they had bet on the game or not. It was a silly idea.