Hester and Millen both strayed, but Millen's accomplishment was much grander than Hester's.

Literally, he was perfectly awful as a National Football League general manager.

On Thursday, ESPN announced what had been reported earlier, that it had hired Millen, the former president and chief executive officer of the Detroit Lions, to serve as a college football game analyst and as an NFL studio analyst, chiefly on "Monday Night Countdown."

He is scheduled to start in August.

Millen, 51, will travel to the site of each "Monday Night Football" telecast where he will work pregame and postgame shows with Stuart Scott and Steve Young.

On the college football side, Millen will work both regular-season and bowl games. His 2009 assignments have not been determined. Beginning in 2010, ESPN takes over the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) telecasts from Fox.

How long will it be before viewers stop seeing that blinking neon sign on Millen's forehead pulsing 0-16 . . . 0-16 . . . 0-16 when he's on camera?

My hunch is he'll do just fine as an ESPN football analyst, for a few reasons.

The first reason is, Millen is a really talented broadcaster. Terrifically talented.

When he left Fox to become the Lions' chief football executive, he was on the No. 2 game broadcast team with Dick Stockton. This reviewer wrote somewhere in the mid-'90s that Stockton-Millen was better week in and week out than Pat Summerall-John Madden, Fox's No. 1 team.

Millen was energetic, personable, articulate, humorous, and all of that came through the screen. And yes, he was football smart. He was a natural for that job.

His experience in Detroit may have stigmatized him, robbed him of a measure of credibility, but it couldn't have taken away his talent as a broadcaster.

Another reason Millen will do all right is that he's working at ESPN, where the inventory of games and platforms for analysis are so vast and varied, he'll be - as scouts are fond of saying - just another guy. He'll be part of a cast of thousands, not part of a cast of five.

He'll have a prominent role, but tons of people have prominent roles at ESPN, a whale that can swallow any number of Jonahs without getting an upset stomach.

Millen's strength at Fox was game analysis. You imagine that will be his strength at ESPN.

It will be as a studio analyst when he finds himself commenting on, say, draft picks or stumbling front offices where that sign on his forehead will start pulsing 0-16. But even that will fade and disappear in time.