What's It Going to Take?

Lions fans have been asking this for years, and finally we have the answer. What's it take for Matt Millen to be fired from the front office?

31-84. 53 games under .500. A record that would take over three seasons of perfect, 16-0 records just to get back to even. Too many botched draft picks to count, 3 different head coaches and innumerable co-ordinators fired (including Mike Martz, who was fired after last year and then beat us this Sunday in San Fransisco -- yep, he was what was keeping us down, all right!). Starting and re-starting and building and re-building only to remain firmly stuck in neutral, and in neutral at the back of the pack.

In fairness, it's not necessarily all his fault. There was some bad luck with things like promising draft pick Charles Rogers breaking his collar bone twice. There were picks that looked solid to everybody at the time but didn't turn out (see Joey Harrington, for example). And I do, to a certain degree, admire his unwillingness to quit even when the entire world could see that he was in over his head and not really making any progress.

But after 7+ years and failing to EVER field a team that could boast "average," the camel's back wasn't just broken by one straw too many -- it was broken, then preyed on by the carnivorous desert creatures, fully metabolized, and then excreted back into the desert itself.

And so the battle is half-way won. Millen is done, and there's hope. But we know the team's still a long way from being good, and there's going to have to be more re-building before a contending team can be on the field, and even that can only happen if -- and this is a BIG if -- we can get somebody in charge who's going to be able to get it done. And the person in charge of that? Well, if you didn't already know this, his last name is Ford, and his recent track record isn't a whole lot better.