I live in Michigan, and I've always felt bad for Lions fans, because I don't hate the Lions. I would like to see a good NFL team in Detroit. For one thing, think how nice it would be to have TWO relevant teams playing on Thanksgiving (Lions and Cowboys).
I thought Millen was a bad hire right from day one. He needed some front office experience first. Now that he's finally gone, it's hard to have confidence in the Fords to hire a competent successor. This article by Mitch Albom sums up the situation very well:
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080924/COL01/80924129 And if you want a very brief summary of what made Millen so bad, here's an excerpt from Nicholas J. Cotsonika's article, which is also in today's Detroit Free Press:
Talent seduced Millen, maybe because, at least in the beginning, Millen assumed players had character because he had character. I remember once asking him about work ethic, and he said, "I think all guys are like that." I remember thinking, "But they aren't." It's like an honest man innocently assuming other people are honest, too, because they don't know any different.
Millen eventually figured that out. With Marinelli, he tried to get back to "football character." Marinelli talked about the "non-talented issues." But then the Lions looked up and they had too many non-talented players. In short, under Millen, the Lions had too many talented players with not enough character and too many character players with not enough talent.