Photo courtesy of St. Petersburg Times and Associated Press
I have lost all respect for Brett Favre.
There, I said it. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that this week, Brett Favre came back once again from retirement to join the Minnesota Vikings. He finally got his wish of sticking it to the Packers for requiring him to make a quick decision about retirement the first time around so the team could plan for their future with Aaron Rodgers–He signed with the hated Vikings. Now, if you’re a sports fan, you know there’s no bigger F-U in football than to go from the Packers to the Vikings (perhaps Skins to Cowboys and vice versa ranks up there, too). And why did he do it?
Vanity.
Favre lives off of the constant ass-kissing and coverage ESPN provides. He lives off of the adoration from his hometown fans. He also feeds off of the notion that he’s needed–and the unfortunate situation of NFL quarterbacking perpetuates that notion.
He doesn’t care about the fans. He doesn’t even care about the game. The apologists can’t use the “He just loves the game too much” argument because if he did love the game too much, he would have cared enough to sign early and get into camp. Now he gets to skip training camp and have a hero’s welcome. It just makes me sick. It’s about him, not football (his press conference said as much).
To me, the Favre signing for the Vikings means two things:
1. Zygi Wilf was desperate to sell season tickets in this down economy, and Favre’s name was enough to do the job. And it worked. Not good for the rest of us when it comes to Favre’s narcissism and vanity (the problem, not the solution).
2. The QBs in Minnesota are so bad that they’re willing to take a chance on an almost 40-year-old interception machine (mostly thrown when it counts the most, by the way) coming off of bicep surgery who also has a torn rotator cuff.
Can I just say “Wow?” If you removed Favre’s name from the list of specs and asked NFL teams if they would take someone like that, the answer would be no, right? Absolutely.
Needless to say when he pulled this crap last year and went to the Jets, I wasn’t thrilled about it, but was willing to give him a chance. When he tanked the Jets’ season and Mangini’s job in the last few weeks of the year, I said it was time for him to hang up the cleats. And he did. There was much rejoicing (yaaaaaay…). I didn’t want to see Favre spoil his legacy with another crapjob year.
In fact, I was a huge fan of him in the 2007 season when he took the Packers to the NFC title game. I thought he should have gone out then, because even though they lost, he was on top.
Now, I’m a huge Aaron Rodgers fan. Enough said.
At the end of the day, of course, it’ll all come down to the bottom line: performance. Vikings fans better hope Favre’s first performance in the preseason isn’t an indicator of what’s to come:
1-4, 4 yards.
The incompletions were poorly thrown (though ESPN tried to blame the receivers, naturally). The completion was poorly thrown and probably should have been called incomplete (I think it hit the ground).
Is Favre a Hall-of-Famer? No question. But has he hurt his legacy with his me-first antics the past couple of years? Absolutely. Remember, when Montana got forced out of San Francisco and he went to Kansas City, he at least had the decency to take them to the playoffs before bowing out gracefully. And no one questions his legacy there. Favre should read into that situation and know when enough is enough.
Now if only ESPN would learn how to stop reporting on him every 5 minutes, we’d all be able to move on without the constant headache.
