Blue White Illustrated

P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> he gets a lot of requests for kitchens. "Kitchens are just boxes of wood, and I can't stand making kitchens," he said, laughing again. Millen is also going back to work for the Big Ten Network. He is still regarded as one of the best television analysts in football. At one point earlier in his life, when he was employed by CBS and Fox, Millen was ex- pected to be the successor to John Madden as the NFL's premier TV analyst. That all fell through during his ill-fated seven-plus years as CEO of the Detroit Lions. Penn State's Blue-White Game in April was his post-surgery coming out party. His BTN co-workers surprised him with a cake in the Beaver Stadium press box. When he was introduced to the fans be- tween the first and second quarters of the game, he waved from the booth, giving a thumbs up, and they gave him a standing ovation. "It's great to be back," he told the television audience. "This is one of the things you thought about the whole time you're going through all that back in the hospital." Millen was in Chicago in mid-July for the Big Ten's annual preseason event, mingling with colleagues, reporters and fans. His first two assignments this year are night games: Middle Tennessee State's visit to Michigan on Aug. 31 and a Sept. 14 meeting between Purdue and TCU in West Lafayette. He is especially looking forward to the Purdue game be- cause the TCU coach, Gary Patterson, is a longtime friend going back to the early 1990s when Millen was still playing in the NFL and Patterson was a small-college assistant coach. "We did football camps together," Millen said. "I used to talk to him all the time because he had good defensive thoughts. He was one of those guys who could see it. Now, when I see him, he is still doing some of the stuff we used to talk about then that's just good, solid, fundamental football." 'I go crazy sometimes' Millen is one of the best defensive tack- les ever to play at Penn State, where he teamed with fellow All-America lineman Bruce Clark. Millen used to remind sportswriters that the only difference be- tween he and Clark "is that I go crazy sometimes. Bruce keeps his cool." Millen's brash, headstrong attitude incensed Joe Pa- terno, and they argued a lot on and off the field. It all came to a head in the 1979 preseason when Millen re- fused to perform the two half-mile runs required of all players. Paterno threw him off the team for a while and then stripped him of his co-captain status. Actually, Millen completed the half-mile runs when he returned to preseason practice. He apologized to the team, but the dam- age had been done. In his 1989 autobiog- raphy, "Paterno: By the Book," the veteran coach wrote that "the morale and con- centration of the team was severely shaken." An ankle injury in midseason sidelined Millen for the year, as the 1979 team, which was one year removed from playing for the national championship against Alabama, rallied from a 1-2 start to finish 8-4 without him. Millen went on play on four winning Super Bowl teams and received All-Pro recognition as a linebacker during his 12-year NFL ca- reer. "My view of [the suspen- sion] has never changed," Millen said. "There are two sides of the coin. Knowing what I know now and look- ing back on it, doing those tests was absolutely, totally useless. What I kept saying to him was, I trained harder than anybody. I trained constantly. All I did was lift weights all the time. And Joe had this thing about weight, too. He didn't want you to be any heavier than he thought you should be, which didn't make any sense to me then and still doesn't make any sense. He ac- tually changed that later. Joe didn't un- derstand lifting. He just did it because everyone else did it. "I also think the way I handled it was completely wrong. So my little remark [back then] – 'If I have to chase a guy for half a mile, he's going to score' – wasn't very good for the team. Some guys thought it was funny and other guys thought, I can't believe you didn't do that, which I DYNAMIC DUO Millen and Clark pose with Penn State assistant coach J.T. White. Both defensive linemen were first-team All- Americans for the Nittany Lions in the late 1970s. Photo courtesy of the Pat- tee and Paterno Li- brary Archives

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