We'll miss Miller, as we thought he was one of the best football reads there was. He wrote in a bare-bones style and just stuck to football, shying away from long discussions of Starbucks experiences and bad 80's teen flicks. We also liked him because he was old school, a throwback as it were, who still loved the nuts and bolts of football and the smash-mouth aspect of it. With his beard and teddy-bear physique, he came off more as a pre-LA Raiders guy than a Niners guy and we mean that as a compliment too in the same way we mean a "beer drinker" is much cooler than a "chardonnay drinker." He also never kissed butt in his columns, played contrarian just to be contrarian, nor got with the negative just to be schticky. He just wrote what he thought and said what he saw. He was a football through and through.

Miller's departure is yet another in a long list of departing sports columnists at the Chron, following the departures of David Steele and Brian Murphy and the "reassignments" of Glenn Dickey and Tom Fitzgerald. Now, the Chron is down to Ray Ratto (who pretty much owns the page), Gwen Knapp, Scott Ostler, and Bruce Jenkins with John Shea holding down baseball and Janny Hu holding down basketball. As far as we know, and we don't know much, there hasn't been a replacement named to take over the main football beat, although we're guessing it'll either be Kevin Lynch or Nancy Gay.

As we've said before, there was a time people could hold up the Sports section of the Chron as something that the Chron did great. Now not so much. It's still good, but it's just a shadow of its former self. Both Dickey and Miller were with the paper since we could remember and now they're both gone, a testament to how some people seem to think that getting rid of something's best yet most expensive assets are considered to be good in the long run.