Why We Loved (and Hated) Brett Favre

As the dust has settled on the retirement of Brett Favre and his glorious Packer career, there are still the dying battle-cries going between those who have been perceived as the “Favre Lovers” and the “Favre Haters”. Why has this odd battle between all self-proclaimed Packer fans continued for so long? Why has the legend of Brett Favre split the fan base in such a polarized way?

In an amusing anecdote, an old childhood friend of mine was quoted by Peter King in January talking about what Favre has meant to the Packer fandom, going as far as to admit he dreamed of going mall shopping with Brett. Other than that little slip of T.M.I., my buddy talked about how inspirational Favre has been, how the dreams of this little town have ridden on his shoulders for so long, how he would be unable to go to work the day after Favre would announce his retirement.

And, so it was true on that day. But, as the Peter Kings and John Maddens of the world glorified Favre’s name, while the Dr. Z’s and Sal Palantonio’s piled on with words intended to diminish his accomplishments, the question that I ask is “why”?

Why did Favre turn some Packer fans into zealot-crazed Brett fans, who toiled to find any excuse for his mistakes or decline in play? And why did Favre turn other Packer fans into cult-like missionaries crying against anything he said or did, actually calling for Aaron Brooks to be brought back as a better option than Brett?

The answer, in my opinion, doesn’t actually come from his play on the field. Oh, you will certainly find many who will categorize every single interception and every time he didn’t pull out a game in the final minutes, but that’s not where it started. Some will point to his flippant press conferences, saying he undermined his teammates and coaches with politically incorrect, honest opinions.

It all comes down to one thing: Brett Favre let us in.

He let us in, and we saw him as more than a name and a number. We knew Brett Favre more than we’ve known any quarterback, any player in recent memory. For most of us, it increased our own emotional investment in him, our own reasons to root “for” a player as well as a team. He became larger than life, when in actuality, he was one of the only “real life” players we watched.

Most of our quarterbacks nowadays are supposed to be stoic field generals. We tend to frown upon the emotional and wild personalities, such as Ryan Leaf and Tony Romo. What do you know of the life of Peyton Manning, beyond his television commercials and the fact he wears #18 for the Colts? Is he married? Does he have children? Has he ever said anything to really tick you off? What has he gone through in his life that drives him?

But we don’t know those things. Tom Brady has personified that now-you-see-me-on-the-field, now-you-don’t-off almost perfectly until this past season, when his relationship and parental issues crept into the news. We don’t expect that from our offensive leaders. We expect strong, stoic leaders who do and say the right things.

Oh, sometimes, you get a guy like Terrell Owens or Chad Johnson, guys who try to “let us in” with their antics on the field, but NFL fans know an act when they see it. Anyone notice how quiet Chad Johnson got when he stopped producing and his team stopped winning in 2007? Look-at-me antics aren’t letting us see the real person inside, just the caricature they want us to see.

But starting with Brett’s somber press conference, with his coach, his GM, his owner, and his fiancée at his side, announcing that he was addicted to painkillers and was seeking treatment, Favre let us in to see the human side of his life, the painful side, the things we don’t allow anyone else to see. Even coming forward as he did regarding his painkiller addiction was far different from the “no comments” and other assorted denials we hear when today’s players get caught. Denial is the politically correct way to deal with such accusations. Admitting you have a problem is the difficult and correct way to deal with it.

As time went on, the snowball of humanity grew. We saw him play with injuries that most players would have sat down with. We saw him continue to play with a youthful exuberance on the field that we wish other uninspired players would learn from. We saw him go through a very public death of his father, a very public death of his brother-in-law, his wife’s very public battle with breast cancer, and his family’s loss in Hurricane Katrina.

That snowball grew for everyone: not just his fans and growing fanatics, but the paparazzi-like media, who started treating every story about Favre as if it were about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. Why? Because they knew there was an audience for all things Favre, and they write about what is going to sell copies.

On the other side, though, are the Packer fans who grew contemptuous of this snowball. They, too, spent some time with their Favre jerseys on, cheering him on. But around the early 2000’s, the backlash started. As that media snowball made the Packers into “Favre’s Team”, soon Favre started getting the blame whenever the “Green Bay Favres” didn’t win a Super Bowl. And in some ways, they had reason to do so.

Many football fans don’t want to get involved with their players. They don’t want to know where they came from, where they live, who they’re dating, or what they eat for dinner. All they care about are the cold, hard statistics, the biggest being wins and losses. As we saw Al Harris get eaten up by Plaxico Burress in the NFC Championship game in January, many of us started immediately brainstorming replacing Harris at corner, whether by the draft or by free agency.

Easily substitutable. Pay no mind Harris was a hero in the 2003 playoff game against the Seahawks and had played at a Pro Bowl level for some time. When an NFL player falters, he is expendable. Period.

It’s like we view our players as Madden players. When your starting quarterback falls below an overall rating of 90, don’t you start looking for another digital field general? Do you care about that other quarterback? No…he’s a name and a number, both of which are easily replacable.

Until we start talking about Brett Favre, who for many fans was completely irreplaceable, not just because of his play on the field, but because he allowed us to feel something beyond the name and number. For most of us, this created perhaps the fiercest loyalty to a player in decades, and for most, in memory.

For others, it was a ball and chain. It was an inconvenient loyalty that drove them crazy when the statistics said there is no reason any quarterback with 29 interceptions in a season should ever see a start again in their career, and yet, there he was again.

The insanity worked both ways, both for the Favre Fanatics who would have rather seen the whole team sacrificed, the future mortgaged, to give Brett a chance to prove himself as worthy of his hype, his reputation, his loyalty. And, there were those who took any comment, any bad decision, any “holding the team hostage” to discredit that hype, that reputation, that loyalty.

There would never have been a battle if it weren’t for one thing. Brett Favre broke the rules. He broke the mold of the great quarterbacks, the stoic, impenetrable façade that all are supposed to have, like Starr, Unitas, and Montana. He became more than a name we chanted, a number we wore on our own backs.

We cared. We cared about this man and his triumphs and his failures. We cared because he let us in and see parts of his life we would have kept secret. We saw him take his weakness and turn it into strength, and we cheered him for it, for making us a part of it.

And in some cases, we turned bitter at him, felt used and let down when he didn’t live up to the feelings we were supposed to have, when the facts and statistics didn’t support what we, deep down, wanted to feel.

As Favre rides off on his tractor into the sunset, hopefully the zaniness on both sides of the coin will take a deep breath and appreciate Brett Favre for the things he really was: a gunslinger, a winner, a risk-taker, an improviser, an ironman….and a real person, just like us.

Fluidity Makes McCarthy a Surprise Success

They were few decision made in recent Packer history that dropped as many jaws as Ted Thompson’s coaching hire of an offensive coordinator from a last-ranked offense. I remember vividly stating in the weeks leading up to the hire that I would have been happy with nearly any of the major candidates at the time—Russ Grimm, Tim Lewis, etc.—as long as it was NOT Mike McCarthy. Anybody but Mike McCarthy.

Why? I saw McCarthy not only as a guy who appeared to be an ineffective offensive coordinator, but a guy who struggled in a power tug-of-war with Aaron Brooks and was a part of a horrid 1999 Packer coaching staff that seemed to begin the cycle of unaccountability for Brett Favre. Worst of all, he appeared to be ego-free, low-key, and little more than a yes-man for a general manager who just fired previous coach Mike Sherman.

Now, once hired, I elected to give Mike McCarthy every chance to prove himself and look for the good in what he did, as well offering criticism. One of my biggest concerns was that when he coached Brett Favre in 1999, he set his then-career high in pass attempts, a record he broke in his final year with Mike Sherman. The fact that Favre broke that record again last season (as well as a bottom-quarter rushing offense) didn’t exactly bring a lot of bubbly confidence that McCarthy had progressed as a cultivator of quarterbacks, much less an NFL offense.

But, I noticed quickly, even before the four-game winning streak to finish the 2006 season, that McCarthy was great at what I called “spit-and-wire”, the ability to take what wasn’t working and somehow make adjustments to get it up and operational. This was particularly important that season, as the unheralded first-year coach was given a lot of raw and NFL-E talent to work with along the interior line, while trying to shoehorn a zone blocking scheme that wasn’t working.

By choosing to keep back seven or eight blockers, and going against the zone blocking grain by pulling guards and implementing more traditional schemes, I praised McCarthy for being able to piece together some success with his flexibility. However, I was still concerned that piecemealing and patching was not going to be a successful strategy in the long run.

But, this season, we saw the maturation not only of Mike McCarthy, who grew much more comfortable in his role on the sideline, but in his ability to adjust as the season went on. Unlike many coaches, who “stay the course” and try to get players to fit their scheme or continue a strategy when it is clearly not working, McCarthy showed a tremendous ability to create and re-invent his team, particularly the offense, to find the easiest path to success.

Call him the anti-Coughlin. I call him “fluid”. Like a mountain stream, water will always find the easiest route down the mountain, even if it takes on some unusual twists and turns along the way. It’s easier to go around the boulder, than to spend the time trying to grind your way through it. It is that fluidity that McCarthy has implemented, and that fluidity that has made him a gem for the Packers.

After just one game, despite his repeated statements that he was going to remain committed to the run, McCarthy realized that the stable of horses he was given to work with wasn’t going to be able to consistently be a threat. He revamped the whole offense. He utilized the shotgun with a short passing game that many of us found uncomfortably familiar from previous seasons, but got his talent to execute consistently. As the running game continued to find its footing, he brought in a spread formation that became as exciting as any offense run in Green Bay in decades, and amazingly, as reliable.

However, games against the Cowboys and the Bears foiled the offense as one-dimensional: perhaps the giddiness of the pass-happy playcalling made it look more like the run-and-shoot than an offensive juggernaut. McCarthy took his diamond-in-the-rough in Ryan Grant and began using him in a more consistent manner, implementing a more traditional running game with the hybrid zone blocking scheme that the line finally began grasping.

He’s also shown a fluid and patient ability to work with players who struggle and make adjustments with them. As the offensive guards struggled mid-year, he shuttled Daryn Colledge, Ryan Spitz, Tony Moll, and Junius Coston around trying to find the right combination, without seeming to injure any egos in the process. As Atari Bigby continued to hurt the team by making critical errors early in the season, McCarthy continued to work with him until he ended up turning into the December Defensive Player of the Month, and a monster in the first playoff game.

But perhaps, his biggest feather has been the ability to rein in Brett Favre, not turning him into a cautious game manager, but not allowing him to remain the careless gunslinger he had been allowed to turn into, either. Favre has not only recaptured the command of his game he lost under Mike Sherman, but sent his loudest critics into hiding. Can you imagine had Favre been playing under McCarthy for the last eight years?

Mike McCarthy was looked over as NFL Coach of the Year, losing to a man who he may face in a Super Bowl in a week or so. And, McCarthy, in all honesty, hasn’t earned that honor as yet. A good coach maximizes what he has to work with in the regular season, and McCarthy certainly has done that. But it is a great coach that is able to elevate that level once he gets to the post-season. It is the next game, and hopefully, the one after that will earn McCarthy and his fluid reboots of his team the honor of being called a great coach.

But, kudos to McCarthy, who has blown our view that a coach should come in with a vision of his schemes and how his team will execute his ideas. What McCarthy came in with was a vision of simply how to win football games, and impressed that vision upon those in his charge, from the wily veterans to the undisciplined youngsters. It is the fluidity of being able to change those schemes, invented and re-inventing the team as needed, finding the easiest path to winning a ballgame, no matter how unconventional it seems, that has made Mike McCarthy a success story for Green Bay fans to cherish.

You Reap What You Sow

As we continue to sift through the fallout of the Chicago Bear fiasco, everybody seems to have a theory as to why the Packers laid an egg in front of their biggest division rival, in a game so pivotal that it made games the following week moot because it ended the home field race prematurely.

But, if you step back and look at it, the results could have been quite predictable. This team hasn’t been built for games like this.

“Crikey!” you say, “How can the Green Bay Packers not be prepared for a cold and blustery day in December? How come they were always so strong under the coaching of the other Mikes? Isn’t Favre 149-1 in cold weather games??”

And the response to that has to be: this isn’t the same kind of team. Period. Particularly on offense.

One of my accolades that I have given to second-year coach Mike McCarthy is that he is very talented at what I call “spit-and-wire”. He is willing, over the course of a season, to adapt and duct tape up holes as best he can. We saw it last season and much of the beginning of this season, when the running game was AWOL. The offense was modified to accommodate it. Of course, it usually led to Brett throwing the ball 45+ times per game, but you have to admire a coach who is willing to tinker and find the smoothest path to a victory.

But those modifications have created a team that is very unlike the teams we’ve grown used to over most of Brett Favre’s career, when players like Dorsey Levens and Ahman Green could be counted on to churn out positive yards on blustery winter days. Certainly, we all remember our favorite “mudder”, Edgar Bennett. On those days, Brett might throw 15 passes in all, and the Packers would eventually wear down the opposing defense, making them long for the warm locker room.

Much as the Bears did to the Packers last Sunday.

As much as people praise Ryan Grant for being a Levens-esque back, he certainly hasn’t proven to be the answer to our running game on a consistent basis. While he has rushed for significant yardage and certainly has made a positive impact on the offense, he does need the passing game to compliment him. For the most part, the passing game has done their part this season.

But, on Sunday, despite the glowing statistic of 100 yards on 14 carries, 90 yards were on 2 of those carries. That left 12 carries for 10 yards, and in a bitterly cold game, you can’t sit back and wait for the home run in between many strikeouts.

A quick look at Grant’s carries for the day (in yards) illustrate the problem: 24, 0, 2, 0, 0, 4, 66, 1, 0, 4,-3, 2, -1, 1.

The amusing part of looking at those statistics was remembering how people used to talk about how Barry Sanders, the former running back for the Lions, used to play. “He might get you three plays for negative yardage running around back there, but then he’ll hit a home run that makes it all worth it!”

But, like Sanders, that style of play doesn’t do much for you in the cold, when smash-mouth football rules the lines of scrimmage. Who can forget the cold playoff game at Lambeau Field in 1994, when Barry Sanders was held to -1 yards rushing in the prime of his career?

The Bears were the lesser team, but their team continues to be built to play at home in the cold weather, rushing the ball 45 times for 139 yards. Adrian Peterson and Garrett Wolfe got the ball early and often, and while they averaged only 3 yards per carry, it was good enough to win a game on a short field in conditions like this.

Thinking back to those dome-team Detroit Lions of the 90’s, there’s another structural change that Mike McCarthy has employed that has really changed the makeup of the Packer offense. While we have praised the four and five-receiver sets utilized this season, it looks uncomfortably like the old Run-And-Shoot offenses of the 90s, offenses that often proved unsuccessful when those dome teams played outside in December.

Those teams also utilized the mid- to long-pass plays for the bulk of their yardage, while the Packers of the 90’s utilized an innovative West Coast Offense that emphasized the short passing game, particularly the screen play.

It would be remiss to note that perhaps the biggest execution difference from the 90’s Packers to the 2007 version is the failure to establish the screen pass successfully, and in a game like last Sunday’s, the screen pass was an effective weapon. We saw Kyle Orton execute the play over and over again, while Favre, once thought of as the finest screen passer of all time, had his passes batted down time and time again.

So, as we bemoan the loss of our teams’ cold-weather advantage we once held in the 90’s and early part of this decade, we have to look at the team we’ve built. Instead of a WCO that pounded the ball with hearty gusto in cold weather, keeping defenses honest and on their heels with effective screen passes, we have something that has a bit more in common with the old Run and Shoot…especially when the temperature drops and the wind picks up.

In other words, Mike McCarthy and his coaches have spit-and-wired this team to maximize what talent they have: a sign of a good coach. However, the double-edge of that sword came back to bite them on Sunday, when the spit-and-wire froze up in Chicago.

Perhaps Favre was correct when he felt the road to the Superdome might be easier on the artificial turf of Texas Stadium than at home in January. Only problem is, we have a home playoff game to play first.

I trust that Mike McCarthy is reviewing game film, and will continue to do so during the bye week in order to “spit-and-wire” this offense into a more familiar cold-weather structure. Let’s hope that it is enough.