When the Big Ten Network’s Matt Millen provides color commentary during Saturday night’s Michigan-Middle Tennessee State game at the Big House in Ann Arbor, it will have been exactly 251 days since he underwent a Christmas Eve heart transplant.
It’s a well-documented story. Millen was a fierce defensive tackle at Penn State. The Raiders – of course it had to be the Raiders – drafted him in 1980 and as a rookie he won the first of what would be four Super Bowl rings in a 12-year career as a linebacker on four teams. He would graduate to the broadcast booth in the 1990s. Then came his catastrophic foray running the Detroit Lions, followed by a successful return to football commentary on TV.
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And now comes the chapter that has brought Millen, 61, his most recent, and most sympathetic, wave of attention: He was diagnosed in 2017 with a rare condition called amyloidosis, which causes proteins in his bone marrow to build up and attack his organs. His heart was operating at only 30 percent capacity, and even with chemotherapy treatments, he needed a transplant.
The debilitating condition and treatments sidelined his broadcast career last October, and he received a new heart on Dec. 24. His recovery has been as well as the doctors could expect, he said, and by April he was in the booth broadcasting Penn State’s spring game. Millen handled Raiders preseason game telecasts this summer and is scheduled for a full slate of Big Ten broadcasts this fall.
It’s evident when Millen appears on TV that he’s not quite the hulking specimen he once was. The hair is a bit whiter and a bit thinner, too. The thick mustache is still there, but the physical toll is obvious. Still, he’s putting back on some of the 50-plus pounds he lost during treatment.
Millen talked to The Athletic this week for a 45-minute telephone interview from the driveway of his Pennsylvania farm that he has owned with his wife, Patricia, since the early 1980s. He spoke from his car after having just returned from a pharmacy to get refills for some of the 20 prescription pills and vitamins he now must take daily.
That’s down from 60 pills a day, including the anti-rejection drugs he will take the rest of his life. Progress is progress. Millen doesn’t complain.
“You just make it part of (your life). It’s got to get taken care of. I just do what they tell me to do and hope for the best, and so far, so good. There’s a bigger picture. Now, I can go up and down steps and before I couldn’t. I can lift things I couldn’t lift before,” he said. “My shoulders are beat up from playing, but that’s about it. My knees, my hips, my back, are fine.
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“Normally, I don’t feel much different except when I walk or exercise and feel active. You get those days sometimes. I don’t know how to explain it. You just feel beat and you have to lay low. But like today, I got up and felt fine. I’ve been like this the past seven or eight years.”
He is eager to talk about two things: Football and his farm, where he has maintained a woodshop filled with vintage machinery and hand tools.
When he calls the Michigan game on Saturday alongside play by play man Kevin Kugler, it’s a reminder that he was nearly a Wolverine instead of a record-setting All-American defensive tackle at Penn State. Bo Schembechler personally recruited him, but Millen eventually was won over by Joe Paterno at Penn State.
“I almost went to Michigan. I told Bo I was coming,” Millen said. “Penn State was not my first option. After I told Bo no, I committed to Colorado, but my dad wouldn’t sign the papers. I was only 17. National letter day came and went. Coach Paterno came in and I signed with him two days later. It works out.”
Schembechler, who coached at Michigan from 1969-89, became a friend.
“Michigan was a place I really liked. I loved Bo. He was great when I was in Detroit (with the Lions). He’d call me, we’d talk,” he said.
Millen has an affection for Jim Harbaugh, the Michigan coach who is a fascinating mix of football brilliance, eccentricity, frustration, as well as being an endless well of inspirational quotes and aphorisms.
Their paths didn’t cross much during their NFL playing years. Harbaugh quarterbacked the Bears during a 20-7 loss to Millen’s Redskins during the 1991 season, but Millen doesn’t recall the game. He did end up signing and cutting Harbaugh as a backup quarterback with the Lions before the 2001 season.
After four seasons running the Michigan program, ex-Wolverines quarterback Harbaugh has yet to beat archrival Ohio State and that’s a scarlet-and-gray letter on his chest until he does.
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“That’s what he’s being judged on is that one game. Jim knew that coming in. He played there. He understands the importance of a loss,” Millen said. “I’ve been a big Jim Harbaugh fan. When I was in Detroit, I brought him in. I thought he still had some gas left in the tank. I always thought his approach was good. He loves the game. You are dependent upon the kids who are playing for you. He’ll win. I don’t know if this is the year he beats Ohio State or not. We will see.”
That’s classic Millen. “We will see.” He’s correct. No one can truly predict with any certainty what will happen when the Buckeyes come to Ann Arbor on Nov. 30. Millen will study the game film and offer his best analysis. And when he’s not preparing for a broadcast, he’s back in Pennsylvania working on his sprawling farm.
The image of Matt Millen, former beefy and nasty NFL linebacker turned gregarious football broadcaster maintaining a quiet life as a country squire and master craftsman is an incongruous one but nevertheless true and accurate.
It begins with a choice about drugs, and like many stories about cocaine in the freewheeling 1980s, it begins in Oakland. Millen was not one for the Studio 54 life, unlike many pro ballplayers of the era who were seduced by the bright lights, easy money, available women and pricey drugs. The Oakland Raiders were at the height of their crazed gonzo era of drugs and violence.
Millen opted for the on-field violence instead of the off-field blow. He spent his money on woodworking equipment instead.
“Back in those days, that’s when cocaine was huge. To me, a wood planer was a lot more appealing than a line of co*ke. I was never one to go out. Guys were going out while I was buying tools. My wife said I have a tool addiction,” he said.
It was during his rookie season that he began buying and restoring woodworking machines that date from the 1930s through the ‘50s, he said. He filled a small shop in his California home, and then a larger space at his Pennsylvania farm. He likes that the machines are sturdy, well-built devices. Not unlike himself – apart from his old heart.
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“Those things are phenomenal,” he said of the planers and jigsaws. “You’ve got something that’s never going to go wrong on you.”
And again, it’s hard not to think of the organ in his chest when Millen talks of his machinery. He’s functionally restored his own machinery. Doing work in the shop and on his farm are substitutes for weightlifting these days.
Millen spends his shop time building things for the homes his four children have purchased. He labors on unexciting woodworking projects such as cabinets out of love more than the thrill of creation.
“Kitchens are the most boring things. All you do is build boxes,” he said, chuckling.
Today, he’s building new window frames for the colonial-era farmhouse he bought with his wife on 150-plus rustic acres in upper Bucks County, Pa., between Bethlehem and Philadelphia. It’s not too far from where he grew up in Hokendauqua, close to the hardscrabble factories and mills of Allentown that Billy Joel lamented in songs decades ago.
“I cobbled together maybe four or five different properties. There are still a couple pieces I’d like to get,” he said. “It’s away from everybody; it’s quiet, in the middle of nowhere. If you find my place, you’re probably lost.”
He gutted the limestone home first built in 1775, dug out a new basem*nt, replaced the roof, and put on additions. Denim overalls, hard work by hand. That’s Millen’s style.
“The bones were good,” he said of the house. “Jackhammered the basem*nt to make a real basem*nt.”
The big homestead is where Millen helped raise his four kids, and where his 10 grandkids come to visit.
He’s no stranger to big, loud families. He grew up as one of 11 kids. At Whitehall High School in the Lehigh Valley, he matured quickly. Physically. He got nastier, into more fights. He shined as a football player on both sides of the ball, although an elbow injury his junior year – he infamously tried to use a vise to fix it – nearly cost him his football career.
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Eventually, the elbow got better. Major college football programs came calling: Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Florida, Penn State. The recruiting process was the stuff of legend, filled with every negative stereotype about corruption and graft. His father wanted him to play at Penn State, which isn’t a bad drive away. So Millen ended up a Nittany Lion, where he flourished and earned first team All-American honors as a defensive tackle. He also was a handful for Paterno, who briefly kicked him off the team once. They later came to an understanding, something that may not have served Millen when Penn State was consumed by scandal.
Millen’s football career after Penn State took him west to the Bay, where he stood in the middle of the Raiders’ defense at 6-foot-2 and 250 pounds.
It’s where his unpleasant side, to be charitable, truly flourished. His unpopularity probably contributed to Millen being voted to just one Pro Bowl, in 1988. He was All-Pro a couple of times, channeling the likes of linebacker legends Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke with his play. He wasn’t there to be liked. He was there to win.
(David Bauman / Digital First Media/The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images)
And his teams did win. Oakland won a Super Bowl in his rookie season. Then he won another with the Raiders – who played in LA at that point – in 1984. Millen won rings during his stints with the 49ers in 1989 and with the Redskins in 1991.
When his playing career ended, he made the natural progression to TV. Millen worked the football broadcast booth for CBS, Fox, NBC, the NFL Network and ESPN, and for the Westwood One radio network during his career. Today, he does color commentary for the Big Ten Network, a role he stepped away from when his heart conditioned was worsening and doctors said he was in dire need of the transplant. He spent three months in the hospital waiting for a donor.
A 26-year-old man died in December and Millen received his heart in a transplant at New Jersey’s Beth Israel Medical Center on Christmas Eve. By all accounts, the heart was a perfect fit and the procedure was textbook.
By April, Millen was well enough to work the TV booth for Penn State’s spring game in Happy Valley.
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The treatment and operation weren’t without physical costs. He’s better, but the procedure left him working to regain feeling in some of his fingers, to regain his appetite, and to regain his endurance. Millen is working at it. He said the strength is back and most of the feeling. His taste buds are still in rehab. He’s thankful he can taste garlic, which he loves, but must avoid mushrooms and moldy cheeses. Doctor’s orders.
The diet and rehab have worked so far. This summer, he was back in the broadcast booth to do commentary for Raiders preseason games alongside Rich Gannon and play-by-play announcer Beth Mowins.
Keeping to routines helps. He has his medical routines. His family and farm routines. His broadcast routines.
During the season, his week is structured much like it was when he was a player. He flies home on Sundays to spend time with his wife, their fleet of dogs, and any children or grandchildren that may be visiting. Mondays and Tuesdays are reserved for work around the farm and the woodshop.
It’s Tuesday night when the football job begins again. That’s when he begins to memorize the rosters.
“College football is brutal because there are so many players with the same numbers. Sometimes that gets a little much,” Millen said. “I memorize the starters and backups.”
There’s a midweek conference call with the coaches. That’s also when he gets serious about watching game film, which has been the backbone of football knowledge since the days of hand-cranked cameras.
“On Wednesday, I’ll start watching clips and reading all the stories and notes,” he said. “On Thursday, I’ll fly out to the game site and watch film. That’s the main thing. Articles — people don’t have a clue. They’ll say who made a great play, but unless you study film, unless you break it down, you don’t know who is doing what. Coaches lie, players lie. Tape don’t lie.”
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Other than the flight, Thursdays during the season are film-intensive. That’s where Millen picks up the tendencies, quirks, secrets. The tactical tidbits he gleans for viewers on Saturdays.
“That’s really all I really need to see. I can see from the film what you’re trying to do, who played well, what broke down,” he said.
There’s more film study on Friday, which is when the rest of the broadcast crew typically arrives, he said. They catch up and meet in-person with that weekend’s coaches. The crew works up its game plan for the broadcast that night or Saturday morning.
“I don’t take a lot of notes. I learned that from Coach Madden a lot of years ago,” Millen said. “Get an opinion of every player. It’s your opinion based on what you saw. You can’t be wrong because it’s your opinion.”
That’s John Madden, who was no longer head coach of the Raiders when Millen was drafted with the 43rd overall pick in the second round in 1980 but was a special consultant to the team. Millen said he was told that the coach, then on the eve of what’s become an iconic broadcasting career, had recommend the Raiders take the Nittany Lions defensive tackle. They did, and Millen moved to inside linebacker.
Madden didn’t coach Millen on the field, but he later coached him as a broadcaster.
“I like to say Coach drafted me but didn’t coach me. John coached me a lot but not on football,” he said.
The men traveled often on the “Madden Cruiser” – the famed custom bus that the flying-averse Madden had built to ferry him from city to city. Madden, who had encouraged him to become a broadcaster, became his mentor and tutor.
“I spent years with him on that bus,” Millen said. “We talk frequently to this day. John Madden is one of the best football minds I’ve been around. He’s very bright guy. He doesn’t want you to know that. There could not be a better mentor. Not even close. He was it. Between him and Pat Summerall, they taught me a ton, about work habits, how important it was to them, how they improve, think about it.”
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Madden’s influence as a broadcaster shaped the networks, Millen said. Some are about the game, and some are more interested in features and profiles. It’s no surprise that Millen prefers to talk about the game.
“Every place is a little bit different in what they think is important to a broadcast,” he said. “CBS, thanks to John, is football-driven. I loved it. You just talked about football. Fox was similar. ABC not so much. They wanted stories, to tell about the background. I thought it was a bunch of fluff. I didn’t feel comfortable in that stuff. NBC was similar in the same way. Each producer, some don’t have a clue about the game. You have a great story, but then what do you do for the next three and a half hours? I have always preferred to just stick to football.”
Millen, because of his style and on-air personality, was the obvious choice to be groomed as Madden’s successor at Fox. But something happened on the way to broadcast immortality.
Detroit.
Bill Ford Jr., the son of Lions owner William Clay Ford Sr., first sought out Millen for a front office job in the late 1990s, and finally convinced him to do it before the 2001 season. Other teams were interested in him as a front office executive, too, Millen said, but the Lions were the most persistent.
The Fords hired Millen, then 43, as president, CEO and general manager despite have no formal coaching, scouting or management experience.
“From the beginning I was a little wary of it. Playing the game and running a team is a completely different thing. I knew that,” he said. He did it anyway.
Millen, who reportedly came to be paid $5 million a year in Detroit, certainly was familiar with scouting players via game tape and from his dozen season as a pro linebacker, but that’s not the same as same thing as being the top personnel decision maker for an NFL franchise. And it showed. The Lions made terrible draft decisions and even worse coaching decisions – he hired Marty Mornhinweg, a fine coordinator but an utter bust as a head coach.
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Millen doesn’t have much that he wants to say about his time in Detroit, before saying more about his time in Detroit.
“No. I think I’ve said enough. I don’t know what else to say. It is what it is. You can’t change it,” he said. Millen has addressed his Detroit tenure in the past. He accepted the blame. He said he’d have fired himself at one point. He acknowledged the mistakes, that he was in over his head and deferred far too much to others. It was the one time in his football career where he wasn’t aggressive enough.
He doesn’t point to one single transaction as his biggest mistake. There were opportunities to draft other players who went on to be great elsewhere. Millen’s Lions ended up with busts like Mike Williams and Joey Harrington and Charles Rogers. That sets a team back years. The “Fire Millen” chant entered the lexicon.
“I had a couple of (draft mistakes), but just overall we just couldn’t find a quarterback. We couldn’t find that guy,” Millen said. “Guys we wanted went before (in the draft). We couldn’t make a deal. We drafted Harrington and that was not a good fit. We did a disservice trying to put him in that scheme.”
He did make the right decision in drafting Georgia Tech wide receiver Calvin Johnson before the 2008 season. Johnson would go on to become one of the best wide receivers in the game’s history, but like Barry Sanders, he would walk away from Detroit’s dysfunction and losing before his career should have been over. Millen was gone by then, but the black cloud remained.
Millen’s tenure, from the draft mistakes, the 31-84 record, the verbal gaffes, all has been well-documented. Ford Sr., known for his to-a-fault loyalty to his football lieutenants, finally fired Millen in September 2008. The damage, which long pre-dated Millen and still remains to a degree, was done.
During his tenure, the salary cap and contract work was left to others, namely Tom Lewand who would go on to replace Millen as the team’s top executive – and be fired, too. Same as it ever was in Detroit.
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To fix the Lions – and they remain a franchise in need to fixing a decade after Millen was fired – there has to be an entire shift in mindset from the owner’s suite to the front office, the coaches, the players and support staff, he said.
“You have to change a whole culture. That’s not easy to do. It permeates the whole organization,” Millen said. “The front office. It’s in the fanbase, in the media base. It’s hard to get it out. Once you lose, it’s ‘Here we go again.’ It’s hard and it takes strong people. You can be at the head of the organization and be fine and be the head coach and be fine, but it’s not in your locker room, you don’t have a chance.”
There isn’t much bad blood between Millen and the Fords.
“Mrs. Ford called me in the hospital. I’ve seen Bill (Ford Jr.) but not lately,” he said.
Millen was especially close to Ford Sr., who died at age 88 in 2014 and bequeathed the team to his widow Martha Firestone Ford.
“Mr. Ford, I loved that guy. Forget about football, the Lions. As a person, he was one of my favorite people. I have his picture on my office wall,” he said.
That expression of love is one side of Millen. The Dr. Jekyll. On the field, and occasionally off of it, the monstrous Mr. Hyde would appear, filled with fanatical violent rage.
Millen has deep religious convictions. He’s said to be kind, generous. A loving husband, father, doting grandfather. An insightful color broadcaster who occasionally says something that gets him in trouble. A guy that apologies for being a jerk who has used slurs. A nasty brute who fought not only other players but also his own teammates — and even an opposing general manager on the field after a playoff loss. A man whose words in interviews could reek of arrogance and whose misplaced passion – Exhibit A: his defense of Paterno during the Jerry Sandusky child rape scandal at Penn State – sometimes brought him scorn.
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Millen certainly contains multitudes. How does he maintain the balance between the choir boy, family patriarch, the knowledgeable extemporaneous football guy on TV, and the angry jerk?
Millen was always the Hulk, because that the only way he could play football, he said.
“Once it’s there, you can’t get rid of it. I could still do that. It’s hard, it’s a process,” he said. “Every year my wife and kids would know training camp was coming up because I would change. My wife called it the metamorphosis. For me to play at that level, I had to convince myself it was actually important when it’s really just meaningless. It’s just a game. That takes some time, at least for me it did. I had to get my mind right. Maybe it’s different for others, but I had to get myself in a state where I could handle anybody, fight anybody. Whatever it took, I was gonna do. I had to tell myself it was the most important thing in my life. Maybe that’s a sad commentary, but it’s necessary because if you’re not all in, you’re not in.”
That thinking is why Millen understands and supports Colts quarterback Andrew Luck’s surprise decision to retire at age 29 in the wake of injuries that have left him mentally and physically drained. He understands the toll that football takes in every facet of a player’s life.
“Good for you, Andrew. You understood it. I understand completely what he was doing,” Millen said. “You have to be all in. That’s when I retired. Coach (Joe) Gibbs called me (ahead of the 1992 season), and I said, ‘It’s not there. I can’t do what I used to do. I can do part of it.’”
Has the literal change of heart affected his mindset?
Nah.
Millen says he’s the same man. The same bundle of contradictions. Getting a new heart didn’t make him into a man who sets long-term goals to accomplish before the end, even if he’s aware of his own mortality more than ever before.
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“The transplant hasn’t changed anything. I’m not one to have a goal on the fridge. I was never that guy. Your goals should be ever-evolving, the next step. There should never be an ultimate goal,” he said. “My rookie year, we won the Super Bowl, and I said, ‘That’s it?’ But then I said, ‘There’s next year, let’s do this again.’ Expand the universe, man.”
His does have one long-term goal: Watch his kids continue to grow up and his grandkids become adults.
“My kids and the grandkids, really that’s what it’s all about. I like to see my kids with their kids. Sometimes it gets too loud. I just leave for someplace,” he said.
Millen isn’t one for regret, save one: “I think the biggest thing is staying alive. When the times comes, it comes. I have only one regret. I never wrestled and I should have done that,” he said.
Millen is uncomfortable, at least slightly, with the media coverage and public interest in his health and return to broadcasting. He’s modest that way, even if he still grants reporters his time.
“Who am I? Who cares? It’s appreciated. I understand,” he said.
He knows people care because he’s been in and out of the football spotlight for more than 40 years. For his play on the field. For his occasional misstep. For his blunt words. For his championships. For his Detroit disaster. For his rebirth as a highly regarded TV analyst. For his health.
Four Super Bowl rings makes for an interesting story. But not to Millen.
“They’re in a drawer someplace. I don’t even look at them,” he said. “It’s more fun to sit on my porch and watch a hummingbird go from plant to plant and look at all the flowers my wife has planted. Two days ago, I was cutting the fields on tractor. I was looking down and thinking at how beautiful this is. How much better does it get than this? It cannot get any better.”
(Top photo: Randy Litzinger / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
