Star football players tend to be boring. Getting creative and adventurous on the field and deviating from the plan can cost a player his spot in the league. Football players are trained to follow rules and regulations, and for the successful ones, that extends to consuming as much film study as possible.
Miller is the exception. “I watch film on my iPad and stuff, but, not really,” Miller says with a laugh. Unless it is the playoffs — more on that later — he’s totally finished with football once he’s home each day. He tries to complete all of his game preparation and film study at the team facility so that he can use his free time to be free: namely, to watch National Geographic or dive into a new online theory. This offseason he’s become intrigued by the last ice age, and more recently by a creature called “Haast’s eagle,” which piqued Miller’s interest by going extinct because its primary food source, the flightless moa, went extinct due to hunting by humans and other causes.
“I spend a lot of time looking up extinct animals,” he says. Miller describes this chain of events as though spending hours learning about Haast’s eagle was a highlight of his offseason. He’s particularly fascinated by the moa going extinct so quickly. It took only 100 years, he says. “That is so super fast. It normally takes at least 1,000 years. But that’s what happens. Humans hunted the moa to extinction, and the Haast’s eagle went extinct right after because that’s what he ate.” (Dinosaurs are not a part of Miller’s fascination with the extinction process because “everyone already talks about them.”)