One of the league’s most dysfunctional teams last night took a step toward change. Will two others follow?

Matt Millen was an adequate announcer and a solid football player but in seven seasons and change he never came close to bringing the Detroit Lions to respectability. The long-embattled president and general manager lost his job to either resignation or firing last night after an ugly 0-3 start capped off a 31-84 mark since he took the helm.

Lions fans have been waiting for this for years. All it appears to have taken was for the son of the owner to say after Sunday’s debacle that fans deserve better and he’d have made a change if he had any power. Maybe he does – a mere three days later, Millen was packing boxes.

Now there are two other foundering franchises who need to either cut bait or … well, in both cases it would seem like cutting bait is the answer, at this point.

The St. Louis Rams have given up 38, 41 and 37 points in three games so far this season. Scott Linehan was so distressed by the second week loss to the New York Giants that he was reduced at the postgame press conference to a babbling, semi-confused state during which he interviewed himself and came just short of doing that finger to lip thing they used to do in cartoons to indicate that characters were crazy.

This week he’s benched Marc Bulger in favor of Trent Green, who is one concussion away from … well, I’ll refrain from getting graphic, but if I were Green I probably would have hung up my cleats after the last couple seasons. The defensive struggles are one thing. But Linehan was hired for his offensive prowess and the team’s biggest output this season has been 13 points, accomplished twice.

There have been rumblings that changes will be made if things don’t turn around. Mid-season coaching changes are generally desperate and pointless and that might also be true of this situation. The Rams are clearly a bad team and whether they get new leadership now or wait until the offseason is moot, but if there is anyone on staff worthy of being evaluated as a possible successor to Linehan it might not be a horrible time to give them a shot.

Then there’s Oakland. I feel for Lane Kiffin in this situation. While you can argue that any coach should think twice about taking a job working for the once-proud and powerful Al Davis, Kiffin signed on last season and immediately got on Davis’ bad side. Reportedly Davis has stripped Kiffin of any say in the team’s defensive game planning, handing those duties to Rob Ryan, and has been hoping the 33-year-old coach would step aside.

Kiffin, who actually has the team playing competitive football, has understandably stood firm, saying he wasn’t going to quit and he would continue coaching until Davis told him he was no longer the head man. The Raiders got stomped on opening day, then racked up more than 300 yards rushing in kicking eight kinds of dog crap out of Kansas City on the road in week two. Somehow the ornery and senile Davis reportedly blamed Kiffin for the Raiders’ loss to AFC darling Buffalo last weekend – a game in which the outmanned Raiders were ahead until the last few seconds of the game.

It’s hard to say what kind of a coach Kiffin could be in a normal situation. Davis has been running off coaches at the rate of one every 18 months or so for the last five or six years and Kiffin’s time likely will soon be done – if it isn’t by the time this actually gets posted.

The worst part of this situation is that the Raiders are not a horrible football team. I still think they made some weird, weird moves in the offseason, as has been written in this space several times. Kwame Harris? Tommy Kelly? Deangelo Hall? Javon Walker?

Some of those guys are decent players, but some of them are oft-injured and/or locker room cancers. Yet Kiffin has them one big play from being a 2-1 team in the AFC where, with injuries to New England and bad referee calls in San Diego, it’s a wide open race after three weeks. He’s getting unspectacular-but-solid play from quarterback JaMarcus Russell, who has yet to throw a pick. Three running backs have 140 yards or more on the ground and rookie Darren McFadden, though shaken up right now, has shown signs of being the threat they imagined in drafting him.

Thing is, if Davis wants Kiffin gone, why not just do the deed? The team reportedly seems to be behind Kiffin. And if the Raiders somehow find a way to knock off rival San Diego and Kiffen still gets axed heading into the bye week, there could be an uprising on the way.

Then again, the combination of indecision and bad decisions when they are made are part of why teams like the Rams, the Lions and the Raiders have been where they are now year in and year out for the last half-decade, languishing somewhere between mediocrity and abysmal. There’s no stability and questionable leadership that lead fans to hold protests like the Millen Man March. When the fans see the problem two years before the ownership does? Well, that’s not a good thing.