Posnanski: With Millen out, now you wonder when Carl Peterson’s reign will end

[Tribal Warfare]

With Millen out, now you wonder when Carl Peterson’s reign will end


Wednesday, one of the most amazing runs in the history of professional sports came to an end. The Detroit Lions finally fired team president Matt Millen. Early stories coming out of Detroit told of people in traffic honking their car horns in triumph, the way they might when a war ends. Who could blame them? In some ways, a war had ended.

A quick history: Matt Millen took over the Lions in 2001, having honed his management skills as a radio and television broadcaster. He took over with the Lions coming off a winning season. Well, obviously, that would not do. Millen went right to work and hired his first coach, somebody named Marty Mornhinweg, who promptly won five of his next 32 games and drew brief fame for electing to kick off at the start of overtime. Millen fired Mornhinweg and then hired Steve Mariucci, fired him and then hired Rod Marinelli, proving pretty conclusively that if you want to coach Matt Millen’s Lions, you better have an M leading off your last name.

Anyway, the Lions lost and lost — losing record every year — and fans booed, everyone screamed, and yet Millen somehow stayed in charge of the football team for more than seven disastrous seasons. How does that happen? It took the team owner’s son this week to finally and publicly mention that, hey, you know, maybe a general manager with an almost impossible-to-believe 31-84 record might not be doing the best work. And so it came to pass. Millen was axed. And the car horns blared.

The interesting thing to me about all this is not that the Lions canned Matt Millen five years after it was clear to everybody else that he was very bad at his job. That’s what bad organizations do. No, it is specifically those five long years that interest me. How do you deal with that as a fan?

There’s really not much fans can do when a team refuses to fire an incompetent general manager or lousy coach. Fans have limited options. Fans can — and do — write angry letters to the newspaper and scream on local talk shows. Fans can start up Web sites demanding that the teams make a move. Fans can, of course, stop going to games, though that almost seems like punishing yourself for your team’s sins.

Mostly, fans have that familiar and helpless feeling of just waiting around for the team to finally figure out the obvious, get rid of the problem and start over. Lions’ fans banged their heads against the wall for years and shouted, “Can you see this? Hello? Is anyone paying attention? Can somebody please fix my football team? Please?” It had to feel a bit like the moment when the power goes out in your house, and you call the power company, and you can’t get through.

You know where this is leading, of course: Now that Millen is finally gone, it seems to me that the most frustrated football fans in America may have shifted about 650 miles southwest. Now, frustration nation turns its lonely eyes to our fair city and the Kansas City Chiefs, losers of 12 consecutive games, a team that has not led a football game in 22 quarters, a team still being presided, generally managed and chiefly executed by one Carl D. Peterson (reign: 1989 to present).

Peterson presents a uniquely frustrating target for fans because he has been around longer than many of them have been alive. He started his job one month before George Bush became president. Not this George Bush. When Carl Peterson was hired, there was no such thing as a World Wide Web, there were no DVDs, cell phones were roughly the size of bar stools, Sarah Palin was a sports reporter in Alaska and Barack Obama was in law school (John McCain was an Arizona senator).

When Carl Peterson was hired, George Brett still had five years left to play (and a batting title to win), the Ickey Shuffle was the hot dance, Michael Jordan had not yet won his first NBA title and Michael Phelps had not yet learned how to swim.

When Carl Peterson was hired, Madonna and Sean Penn were still married, Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” was the No. 1 song in the land, and the comedy series “Seinfeld” had not even begun yet.

You get the point — Peterson has been around for a long time. His first nine seasons were good, often very good, but even that was a long, long time ago. You know all those dreary numbers. A senior in high school right now was 3 years old the last time the Chiefs won a playoff game. Over the last 11 seasons, including this one, the Chiefs have had four coaches, six or seven starting quarterbacks (is it Damon Huard again?), have made the playoffs just twice and have posted an overall losing record.

And now you would have to say that the saga of Carl Peterson has moved past the point of anger and into the realm of the absurd. Carl Peterson is not Matt Millen. Nobody deserves to be compared to Matt Millen. But right now, you would have to say that with Millen gone, Peterson is probably the biggest mystery in the NFL. Every week, dozens and dozens of frustrated fans write in, call in, yell at me from passing cars, all wondering, “How is Carl Peterson still running this team? How is it possible? Is anyone even paying attention? Will it ever change?”

These are hard questions to answer. That’s because there is no answer. I feel certain, though, that a few car horns will blare when the Chiefs finally move on.