As a Packers’ fan and specifically a Brett Favre fan, many people have come to me for my reaction about all the things going on lately.  I don’t claim to represent every Packers’ fan, and in fact I assumed that most of them would disagree with me.  But the more I talk to them and the more informal polling I do, I find out that in fact many of them do agree with me.

Let me start by saying I think Brett Favre is absolutely qualified right now to be a starter on an NFL team.  Probably his best years are behind him, but that being said, he’s easily in the top 5 of current QBs.  Even if you only put him in the top 10, that is still better then about 2/3rds of the starting QBs.  So I was not a person that was saying he was washed up and needed to go, even before last season’s renaissance.  I am also very protective of his legacy and I sort of breathed a sigh of relief when he went out on top.

I honestly believe the Packers’ organization (or at least McCarthy) when they say that they didn’t want him to retire and that they flew down to his home after the season to try to convince him to come back and he said no.  I honestly believe that they made the best choice available to them at each juncture and tried to do the best thing they could not just for the franchise but for the fans and for Brett.  Brett says that they forced him to retire.  I don’t think that is true.  They may have forced him to make a decision, but not that decision.  And quite frankly, he’s the one who put the idea in thier heads in the first place with his talk of retiring at the end of every season for the last 4 years.  Every year the drama gets dragged out longer and longer and you just can’t wait until a week before the season starts to find out who your QB is going to be.  So yes, they forced him to make a decision one way or the other and he went with the other.

I don’t blame him for wanting to come back.  I think there are very few of us who can put ourselves in his shoes, but I’m sure everybody who retires misses it.  And they aren’t super famous with thousands of fans screaming for them every week.  I’m sure when you retire it is hard to imagine your life without something that you feel defines you as a person.  So I don’t blame him for that.  But I just can’t figure out why he can’t understand where the Packers are coming from.  They had to have a decision from him and then having that decision they made all the necessary arrangements to carry on without him.  He doesn’t seem to remember that he works for them, not the other way around.

When he announced that he was coming back, it seemed like a nightmare scenario.  There was no good way out of it for the Packers.  He set himself up so he couldn’t back down, which meant he was definitely going to play somewhere.  It would have been hard for them to welcome him back as the starter and throw away all of the preparations and plans and commitments they had made while he was away.  It would have been bad to pay him $12 million to sit the bench, although maybe they should have out of spite.  It would have set up a terrible situation for Aaron Rodgers (whom I like and think will do quite well) to be second guessed to the point that he would be unable to perform.  It would have been hard to trade Favre away because you couldn’t hope to get much for him considering the other team could only really count on one year out of him at the most, after which he may retire again.  So do you want to be the guy who traded away a superstar for a 4th rounder?  No, there really wasn’t any easy way out of the situation.

I think the Packers’ organization handled it about as well as it could possibly have been handled.  First off, they ran the risk of the fans being pissed that they traded away an icon, but they let it go on long enough and they were (at least on the surface) nice enough that all the fans are just fed up with Brett.  Second off, they got a 4th rounder that could hypothetically go all the way up to a 1st rounder based on the Jets going to the superbowl.  So it’s probably not going to be much but it’s something and it will be something even better if Favre ends up being good.  But really the main thing is that they traded him to a really sucky team!  They have practically guaranteed that Favre will look worse than Rodgers, which was really the danger of the whole situation.  Even on the Bucs (and certainly on the Vikings), Favre could have potentially shown up Rodgers.  The Packers have a really good team and especially really good receivers that will tend to make a QB look even better than he really is.  Also, everybody and his mother knows that Favre didn’t want to go to the Jets which means a) everybody knows the Packers forced him to go, meaning he lost that round and b) another thing stacked against his success since his teammates and the fans all know he didn’t want to go there.  And something tells me a New York media storm isn’t exactly like a Green Bay media storm, so he’ll have that to deal with.  So maybe the Packers did find a way to salvage the situation after all.  And to top it all off, you’ve subtly sent the message to Rodgers that you have so much confidence in him you sent BRETT FAVRE packing.  That’s got to feel pretty good.

So, to summarize, I wish it had never happened but I put most of the blame on Brett.  I think the Packers never wanted to upset him but really tried to make the best possible decisions at the time.  I think Brett has put them in a tough spot time and time again and yet they have never bad mouthed him.  Although I understand why he wants to come back and I empathize with him, I think he has lost a lot of respect and gained very little.

That is all.