Matt Millen on ABC

So, I'm sitting here basking in the glory of the opening Saturday of College football while watching Oklahoma State play Georgia on ABC. Life is good, I think, and then I recognize a voice. It's the same one I heard giving his professional opinion during the NFL draft. It's presence in the braodcast booth at this college football game is just as baffling as it's presence at the draft. I shake my head in disbelief, trying to tell myself that this voice I heard could not be the destroyer of Detroit dreams I believed it to be. Then I am greeted with terrible confirmation with a shot of both broadcasters in the booth. My ears hadn't deceived me. The voice I heard did belong to one Matt Millen. I punch myself in the face.

Last January I tuned into NBC to watch some playoff football. Normally I bypass the windbags on the pregame show and turn on the braodcast only right before kickoff. This day I was slightly off with my timing and what I saw shocked me. There was Matt Millen, recently fired GM of the winless Detroit Lions, sitting on the set going on about what this team needed to do to get their offense going and what that team needed to do to keep up on defense.

I didn't understand it. How could one so inept, who had failed so spectacularly on such a grand scale, be allowed to attempt to disseminate information on the exact thing he was so terrible at? How was anybody supposed to take Matt Millen seriously, let alone NBC for hiring this train wreck of a man? I know that sports are an old boys network that run more on who you know rather than how well you do your job but even given that knowledge Millen's hiring made no sense.

Then came the draft. I managed to miss most of it due to prior obligations(read: work crew) but what I did catch was Millen again going about why this player of that player will or won't be successful in the NFL. One of the most consistent failings of Millen's reign in Detroit was his failing to draft productive players and yet there he was telling America which college kids would or would not make in the NFL. The zombified corpse of Layne Staley giving out advice on how to kick heroin and stay clean could not have been more unqualified.

Now I'll be forced to listen to Millen every Saturday comment on the game I'm trying to watch on ABC. I can only hope that, somehow, Millen's stache grows over his mouth inhibiting him from talking. Either that or during a broadcast at Michigan or Michigan State a disgruntled Lions fan goes all Mark David Chapman on Millen. Otherwise it may a long college football season.