- I'm just as sick of hearing about Matt Millen as all of you, and trust me, I hate writing about him. But I needed to address what he told SI's Don Banks in an article that was published yesterday.
"I don't go backwards,'' Millen said. "I just don't think like that. There's nothing I can do about [Detroit]. All I can do is from here on out. I understand. In Detroit, they need a bad guy. I was a bad guy. I was to blame for the fall of the auto industry and the housing market. Somehow, I had something to do with [Detroit mayor] Kwame Kilpatrick [resigning], although I'm not sure what. But that's what happens when you lose in this game. You give everyone a cheap and easy story to jump on.''
What Millen said above is an insult to anyone with even a little knowledge of the Lions. I know he's trying his best to rebuild his image now that he is again going to be on TV, but come on, does he really want us to believe he was the victim in Detroit? Sure, blame can be passed around to William Clay Ford for hiring him in the first place and not firing him until last year, but Millen is the one that will go down as one of the worst general managers in sports history.
People did not make Millen out to be a bad guy because Detroit needed one. People made him out to be a bad guy because he was awful at his job and deserved to be fired long before he actually was. This has nothing to do with being a bad guy anyways; fans were simply sick of him running their team into the ground and decided to speak up about it to make something happen. This whole "I was a victim and a scapegoat" crap he's trying to pull is maddening and sickening. Scapegoats in the sports world are people that unfairly get singled out for losing a game that was a team wide effort or a bad playoff run where everyone struggled or something like that, not general managers who consistently fail at their job for almost an entire decade.
In the case of Matt Millen, he was anything but a scapegoat, as that implies that he wasn't actually the one responsible for the Lions' woes this decade. Like I said earlier, does William Clay Ford deserve blame in this as well? Sure, as Ford hired Millen and waited much too long to fire him. Even so, that doesn't mean Millen can duck all of his responsibility in the mess that was the Lions during his tenure. To act like the victim is just ridiculous. The victims were the fans who had to deal with Millen's crap for eight years. - Charles Rogers wants to make another comeback attempt, and he apparently enjoys speaking in the third person (see the link for what I'm talking about). I hope he succeeds just so he can pay back the Lions all the money he owes them.
- Boss Bailey was released by the Broncos on Wednesday.
Filed under:
Thursday Notes: Matt Millen Tries to Paint Himself as a Scapegoat in Detroit
By
Sean Yuille