Did Millen get a fair chance to succeed? (1 Viewer)

[[scooter]]

- taking offensive lineman Jeff Backus in the 1st round in 2001

- giving Backus a 6-year, $40 million contract extension

- drafting Joey Harrington in 2002 (I suppose you can give him a pass because everyone was high on Harrington, but it was dumb to pick a QB that high in the first place)

- drafting Charles Rogers in 2003

- signing Az-Zahir Hakim and Bill Schroeder to huge free agent deals

- taking a WR in the first round in 2004

- taking a WR in the first round in 2005

- taking a WR in the first round in 2007

- thinking that Mike Williams was a great player

- hiring Marty Mornhinweg

Sure, Roy Williams and Calvin Johnson are a fantastic duo of WRs. But what good does that do when the rest of the team is garbage?

 

[Jon_Moore]

Is this a serious thread? 31-84

Draft...

Clinton Portis.........Kalimba Edwards

Bob Sanders...........Teddy Lehman

Sean Merriman........Mike Williams

Dwight Freeny........Joey Harrington

Andre Johnson.........Charles Rogers

Brian Westbrook.......Andre Goodman

Lofa Tatupu.............Shaun Cody

Osi Umenyiora..............Boss Bailey

Marcus McNeil..............Daniel Bullocks

Nate Clements..............Jeff Backus

i'm all for bashing millen, but that list (taken from the Free Press who published it today for those that didn't see it) is bunk. a lot of those "better" picks were 10-20 even 30 picks later. I could do that with any team going back 8 years. There are lots of valid reasons to bash Millen, finding the one or two 2nd round gems everyone else also passed on in order to complain about who was picked earlier isn't one of them.

just as an illustration of my point....let's take Portis v. Kalimba...here's the second round that year:33 Jabar Gaffney WR Florida Houston Texans

34 DeShaun Foster RB UCLA Carolina Panthers

35 Kalimba Edwards DE South Carolina Detroit Lions

36 Josh Reed WR Louisiana State Buffalo Bills

37 Andre Gurode G Colorado Dallas Cowboys

38 Raonall Smith LB Washington State Minnesota Vikings

39 Toniu Fonoti G Nebraska San Diego Chargers

40 Mike Pearson T Florida Jacksonville Jaguars

41 Lamont Thompson DB Washington State Cincinnati Bengals

42 Larry Tripplett DT Washington Indianapolis Colts

43 Eddie Freeman DT Alabama-Birmingham Kansas City Chiefs

44 LeCharles Bentley G Ohio State New Orleans Saints

45 Tank Williams SS Stanford Tennessee Titans

46 Tim Carter WR Auburn New York Giants

47 Andre Davis WR Virginia Tech Cleveland Browns

48 Reche Caldwell WR Florida San Diego Chargers

49 Levar Fisher LB North Carolina State Arizona Cardinals

50 Chester Pitts T San Diego State Houston Texans

51 Clinton Portis RB Miami (Fla.) Denver Broncos

52 Anthony Weaver DE Notre Dame Baltimore Ravens

53 Langston Walker T California Oakland Raiders

54 Maurice Morris RB Oregon Seattle Seahawks

55 Doug Jolley TE Brigham Young Oakland Raiders

56 Ladell Betts RB Iowa Washington Redskins

57 Jon McGraw DB Kansas State New York Jets

58 Michael M. Lewis SS Colorado Philadelphia Eagles

59 Sheldon Brown CB South Carolina Philadelphia Eagles

60 Anton Palepoi DE Nevada-Las Vegas Seattle Seahawks

61 Ryan Denney DE Brigham Young Buffalo Bills

62 Antwaan Randle El WR Indiana Pittsburgh Steelers

63 Antonio Bryant WR Pittsburgh Dallas Cowboys

64 Travis Fisher CB Central Florida St. Louis Rams

65 Deion Branch WR Louisville New England Patriots

15 other teams took other players too...none of them as good as portis. you can do this with each one of those examples. Joey Blue Skies was taken 3rd, Freeney 11th - what about picks 4-10? Did they screw up too? That year the split was 50/50 between Jammer and Harrington. Jammer hasn't exactly lit the world on fire...but NO ONE would have said take a DE from Syracuse at #3...and he would have been skewered for doing so.

Like i said, there are a million reasons for criticizing Millen...but that list is stupid.

And it's ok to miss like that from time to time. But JESUS. Get it right half the time, and you're a competitive borderline playoff team. That's what a GM is supposed to do, yes?

 

[ScoobyDoo]

I know it's popular around here to jump all over a guy when he's down, but objectively speaking did Matt Millen get a fair chance to succeed in Detroit? We can all agree that if this was a well-run organization, like the Titans for example, where Millen goes in with a good scouting department and all the staff he needs to get things done right, then his job is a lot easier. But Millen's dealing with the incompetency of the owner right on down through the waterboy, with nobody around him to help him win, and yet he gets blamed. He has a head coach walk out of practice and ride away on a motorcycle thinking that's a fresh way to motivate a team. He's got clueless fans chanting for his removal. Dude's got no friends anywhere, and he gets all the blame. As for draft picks, I don't recall there being a lot of people on this board predicting that Charles Rogers was going to be a giant bust. Why should one pick define a guy's career? Didn't he pick Roy Williams too? I just hope that this tenure in Detroit doesn't define him as a person and as a football man. Hopefully people can see that he had two strikes against him the way that Lane Kiffin does in Oakland.

There's more to being a GM than just drafts.... there's hiring of coaches and staff (including scouts), there's signing/losing FAs.... Millen was horrible in every aspect of GMing...If you want to argue the organization isn't good - that falls on Millen, since that's his job

Do you know what kind of budget he had to work with to set a solid foundation of coaches and staff? How did that budget compare to the budget of other NFL teams? Do you know how much WCF meddled with who was hired into these positions?It's quite possible that he was doomed from the start and thought he could still make it work despite the deck being stacked against him. Or maybe he just too damn proud to walk away.

That's funny. I just had the same reaction when I read the team in your signature.

That team is now 3-1.

 

[GregR_2]

I listen to the NFL on Sirius. A lot. A lot of real football guys on there. I have not yet heard a single, solitary comment that would indicated the Millen didn't deserve to get fired, and deserved it a long time ago. That's not a personal attack, the man was simply unqualified for the job. They mentioned an interview with Mooch who gave a first hand account inside the Detroit front office. If anyone has link, please post it, can't look for it now.

By all, mean, defend Millen from personal attacks. His performance as an NFL GM is indefensible.

From http://nfl.fanhouse.com/2008/09/24/steve-m...fact-an-incomp/

During tonight's NFL Total Access, Rich Eisen got current NFL Network analyst and former Lions head coach Steve Mariucci on the horn to talk about what it meant to work for the worst general manager in the history of sports. (Click Millen's handsome mug for the moving pictures.)

Some highlights after the jump.

When asked if Millen forced him to start Joey Harrington, Mariucci offered this:

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[Millen] wanted to see if we could make [Harrington] into a legitimate starting quarterback -- a winning quarterback -- and I was willing to do that early. As time went on, you know, a young quarterback with a young team -- that's not a good recipe for success.

So, we weren't quite sure that he was going to be the guy, Rich. In fact, we suggested, you know, trading with somebody else for other veteran quarterbacks because we gradually believed that Joey would be better suited to be a backup for a while and watch somebody else do it.

So Matt wasn't willing to spend more money on the quarterback position. Matt insisted that we try to develop Joey and build up other parts of the team while we were trying to develop his skills, but it wasn't going to happen.

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Hardly shocking given how things played out, but it's good to have closure, I guess.

Mariucci also gave his thoughts on Millen taking wideouts Charles Rogers and Mike Williams with top-10 picks even though, as Eisen suggested, he was against it:

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Philosophically, when you build a team -- and, you know, he took the team apart -- they were 9-7 when Matt took over, they were a decent football team and he tried to take it apart and get it to the next level. So there's a lot of rebuilding that needs to be done. With that said, to spend four early draft picks on one position is philosophically difficult to do because you are maybe loading up one position, which two out of the four worked out. Calvin Johnson is going to be a good player and so is Roy [Williams].

But Mike Williams was not somebody we collectively wanted to draft. That came as quite a surprise on draft day that we ended up drafting him when there were so many other good players on the board. In the meantime, you neglect your defense and some other areas of need...

But [Millen] was trying to put in a supporting cast for Joey, to develop Joey's ability to succeed and he did it with the receiver position

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Eisen finally asked Mariucci about Millen's qualifications, which is sorta like Bobby Petrino asking Arthur Blank for a letter of recommendation. If you're too lazy to sit through five minutes of video (but, oddly, not too lazy to read), PFT has the transcript.

PFT's Mike Florio suggests that perhaps Mariucci "is trying in a roundabout way to blame his poor won-loss record on Millen" given his comments that Millen was in way (way, way, WAY) over his head from the start.

Eh, that seems like a pretty big stretch -- Mariucci was fired in 2005; it's been almost three years and he hasn't made a peep about Millen's blinding incompetence until today, after William Clay Ford canned him. I'd hardly classify that as Mariucci looking to pass the buck, and at this point, you'd think he'd want to never bring it up in the hopes that we'd just all forget about it.

If anything, you could argue that Mariucci actually hurt his chances of getting another NFL gig anytime soon by reminding us how bad those Lions teams really were.

 

[Bl Deep]

actually that second round list had about a dozen contributors... Most notably offensive line guys like Gurode, Bentley, Pearson, and Pitts....

i'd argue they'd be better off with any of those guys, maybe have a semblance of an offensive line.