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.
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…
