As a player and broadcaster, Matt Millen was a delight, someone with strong opinions who wasn’t afraid to express them to the media and on the air.
Those strong opinions are one of the reasons he failed as a general manager/team president. He too often let first impressions become lasting impressions, a fatal weakness in a profession where the best personnel people understand that to get the best from a player you have to recognize what he does badly as well as what he does well, and put him into position to bring out the good things.
The reality is that Millen never should have been hired to run an NFL team because he had no experience running anything at any level. And he certainly never should have been retained for 115 games, during which his Detroit Lions went 31-84, 10 more losses than any other franchise over those seven-plus seasons.
That fault lies with the Ford family, which has overseen a franchise that has just one playoff win in 51 seasons.
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Indeed, he is a good guy. Too good to have been burned in effigy by fans in Detroit and to have endured the kind of abuse heaped on him for a half-dozen years by the media, as well as from the Internet, talk radio and other vehicles for fans to express their impatience with losing.
“This is the happiest day of my life,” one fan said outside the team facility after Millen was fired. That may have been more a comment on the quality of the guy’s life than anything else, but it reflected how Lions fans felt about the guy running the team since 2001.
Until he got to Detroit, Millen was a winner.
A defensive lineman at Penn State who became a linebacker in the NFL, he used his brains, his leadership skills and his toughness to compensate for a relative lack of athletic ability. He still is the only player to earn four Super Bowl rings for three franchises: one as a Raider, two as a 49er and one as a Redskin.
He moved up quickly as a broadcaster at Fox, groomed by John Madden to be a lead analyst. Why did Madden like him? For the same reason most reporters did: his insight, his honesty, his knowledge of football and his ability to express in layman’s terms what he saw on the field.
But he was never subtle, which may be why he failed as an executive.
hirings were too often based on impressions, not reality.
His first head coach was Marty Mornhinweg, who impressed Millen with his offensive knowledge.
But head coaches need to handle people more than they need to know Xs and Os. Mornhinweg alienated his team in the first week of his first training camp, expressing his disgust with a practice session by hopping on his motorcycle and driving away.
If he was trying to motivate his team, he did the opposite.
“Herman Moore and I and a couple of linemen were saying let’s pick it up and start all over again, but by that time, coach had driven away,” wide receiver Johnnie Morton said that day.
In a week, Mornhinweg had lost the team and doomed his career as a head coach. The Lions, 9-7 in 2000, were 2-14 and 3-13 in Mornhinweg’s two seasons, and Millen’s tenure as team president got off to a horrid start from which it never recovered.
One longtime football man who thought a lot of Millen suggested Wednesday that one of his faults was believing in prototypes for positions in an era of specialization.
That may be one of the reasons he took wide receivers high in the first round of the five drafts between 2003-2007. If one failed, he had another one to take his place, and that’s exactly what happened: Charles Rogers failed, Roy Williams succeeded; Mike Williams failed and Calvin Johnson succeeded.
igh, especially when they need help at other positions.
Nor did Millen make all the decisions.
According to several accounts, he wanted to take cornerback Quentin Jammer instead of quarterback Joey Harrington with the third draft pick in 2002, but the Ford family insisted on Harrington because they wanted a youngster at a glamour position.
Jammer, chosen by San Diego, is a solid NFL player if not a great one. Harrington flopped as a Lion, flopped as a Dolphin, flopped as a Falcon and signed last week with New Orleans, a third overall pick morphed into a third-stringer who was cut Wednesday by the Saints.
In the end, the blame goes to owner William Clay Ford and his son Bill, whose comment on Monday that Millen should go resulted in just that – Millen going.
As Millen did when he hired Mornhinweg, the Fords hired Millen because they saw he was intelligent, charming and articulate. And honest.
What they didn’t take into account is that he was an amateur scout, not a professional who had spent long hours evaluating players and interviewing college coaches about them. Nor did they consider that he had almost no administrative experience other than perhaps balancing the books in his household. He came out of college, played for 12 seasons, then jumped into the broadcast booth.
people in the NFL or the media who dislike Millen. His friends and supporters included Madden and Bill Parcells, two people whose references most owners would take without a second thought.
But reality says Millen’s route isn’t the proper path to the front office. The only ex-NFL players who are currently pro GMs are Ozzie Newsome in Baltimore, Ted Thompson in Green Bay and Mike Reinfeldt in Tennessee and all three worked their way up the administrative and/or scouting ranks.
Ask the Fords about their car business. Would they hire as a CEO a well-liked super salesman knowing that he had no experience in any other aspect of the business, including administration?
Probably not.
That’s the major reason the Lions have won only one playoff game since 1957. Don’t blame Millen for all of that: He wasn’t born until 1958.
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