I AM DEATH, DESTROYER OF WORLDS
This is how it works. It is very expensive to fire someone, particularly someone under contract for a good amount of money. In fact, companies seeking to fire someone will go to great lengths to wait out contracts or even invent reasons to fire them. Sometimes universities even do this with coaches. They might even hypothetically do it in collusion with known hooker-killers. (Hypothetically.)
If Matt Millen is being paired with Joe Tessitore this season on Saturday nights, let us look honestly at the positives. Joe Tess is calling Saturday night games, and brings with him the contagion of Loki that turned every Friday night game he called into a parallel universe of HD football chaos. This is good, and deserves a moment of minor jubilation because it not only means more Joe T, but less Mike Patrick, i.e. the bad kind of weird you can't wash out of your brain or ears for weeks afterward.
This leaves Millen, who if you're being honest is not as terrible as you're remembering. He's firmly in the lunkhead school of announcing, and frankly we're used to being so underwhelmed by color guys that we don't even really hear them unless they're a.) saying something patently wrong or b). pointing out hot grandmothers in the stands. Millen does both, and at his worst will just be the typical dopey, gassy man-balloon of a color guy you expect and ignore at all but his worst moments.*
*Filtering is one of the most essential of adult life-skills, and color guys fall into a long list of things you shouldn't ever listen to. We listened to the head of NASCAR on-track safety lecture the drivers for a good ten minutes straight once and watched the driver's all put on their most polite bitch-please faces the whole time. You will make the same face while listening to Millen, your least favorite relative, and a cop explaining why he has to give you this ticket.
Either way he won't be talking about Joe Paterno, and that is a win for Millen, you, us, humanity, and reason and rhetoric. More importantly, all ESPN needs to do is put a number one on his back, and then seat him next to Tessitore. He'll never see what gets him: the meteor, the re-engineered dinosaur on the loose from some university lab, the triple ball lightning strike that literally opens the door and tackles him into oblivion. It's all part of the plan and you know it.