[editor's note, by Grizz] Just a reminder, please do not reproduce copyrighted articles in full on the blog. I encourage people to reference articles, post a few key paraqgraphs to get the idea across and then post a link. I've edited this diary down to meet those requirements. Thanks guys, I aprreciate it. [END NOTE]

Here is a nice article from the Washington Post talking about how Madden has allowed a generation of people who like football but never played to actually understand complicated schemes and terminology.

Link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/04/AR2006120401436_pf.html

Article:

T.J. Won was not born into football. He did not grow up the son of a coach. He did not play the game in high school. In fact, the sum of his playing experience consists of throwing the ball with friends in his home town of Milpitas, Calif., after watching San Francisco 49ers games on television.

But in front of his television now, he notices the kinds of details coaches pick up.

"I used to see people lining up and blocking people," said Won, a junior accounting major at Georgetown University. "Now I see players blocking in the flats, helping protection. You know where the quarterbacks want to throw."

He arrived at this knowledge not by hanging around coaches' offices or studying game tapes. He learned it all from a video game -- Madden NFL.

This is a phenomenon the National Football League never could have anticipated. In a world in which 53 million copies of the game have been sold in the last 17 years -- the latest version sold an unprecedented two million copies in its first weekend of release last summer -- Madden has provided the league a perfect conduit to its next generation of fans. And all because of attention to arcane details that has demystified the complexities of football to a population that never before understood them.