Failure™ Magazine

The Failure of Detroit Lions G.M. Matt Millen

Detroit Lions fans licking their wounds even after departure of Matt Millen.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Sports

Detroit rejoiced in the wake of Millen’s departure, celebrating as if one of its four major sports teams had won a championship. (In the past 20 years the city has been rewarded with three NBA titles and four Stanley Cups.) Meanwhile, firemillen.com issued a press release announcing that its “members and staff are ecstatic about the decision to finally get rid of the worst general manager in professional sports history.” But no one was more excited than the message board moderators at Michigan‘s newspaper Web sites, who for years had to contend with users relentlessly posting “Fire Millen!”—not just on sports pages, but on pages relating to politics, religion and every other conceivable subject unrelated to Detroit Lions football.

With Millen gone, the big question for NFL fans everywhere remains: What took so long?

“It’s one of those questions up there with, ‘Why did it take so long to get out of Vietnam?’ quips Rosenberg, who goes on to explain that William Clay Ford Sr. retained Millen because he liked him, and “Ford Sr. doesn’t like firing people he knows personally. Never mind the fact that Millen was incompetent and cost other good people [including, over the years, upwards of 60 coaches] their jobs.”

“I don’t know if you’ll ever see anyone like him again,” continues Rosenberg, noting that the other men on the list of most vilified general managers in sports history have generally been hindered by meddling ownership, payroll constraints, poor fan support and the like. Millen never faced these challenges, yet his teams remained consistently awful, even though the NFL rewards losing clubs with advantages designed to facilitate a turnaround. To recreate the Millen experience, “You would need a combination of someone who is totally incompetent and too stubborn to quit, working for an owner who won’t fire him,” he concludes.

The problem for Lions fans is that there’s no guarantee that the organization will make better decisions going forward. Case in point: Between 1967-89 the Lions employed Russ Thomas as general manager, during which time the team failed to win a single post-season game. In fact, the organization has won only one playoff game in the past 50 years, and the quarterbacks on that [1991] team were the unenviable trio of Erik Kramer, Rodney Peete and Andre Ware, which tells you a little about the quality of quarterbacks playing for Detroit in recent decades.

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