If you’ve been keeping up with sports at all, you’ve probably heard all of the controversy with Brett Favre. ESPN has been giving 10X as much coverage to this issue as they are to the Olympics which start in 2 days.
In a nutshell, Brett Favre, longtime quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, announced his retirement this off-season and the role of quarterback was handed over to Aaron Rodgers, who has been waiting in Favre’s shadow for the past 3 years. Well, when Favre retired, Rodgers was named the team’s started quarterback.
Unpleased with his decision, Favre decided to return to football. However, the Packers had already named Rodgers the starting QB. This created quite a dilemma for the team: Do they honor their loyalty and let Rodgers keep the job or go back on their word and give the job to the QB who already went back on his word, but also lead the team to greatness?
The whole issue has turned into a debacle. Favre wants to start and Green Bay fans want Favre to start. The Green Bay staff has had enough of Favre and Favre has had enough of the Green Bay staff. It seems imminent that Favre will be traded in the next couple of days of even hours. After spending 16 years in Green Bay, it looks like Brett Favre could end up finishing his career in a different jersey.
I have always been a huge Brett Favre fan, but I’m not quite sure what to make of all this. Part of me wants to put my complete opinion on here, but I’d rather wait and hear from others first. Needless to say, this is a mess! In a way, it almost seems like a very difficult ethics issue that a professor would bring up.
I want to get your opinion, but I want you to throw bias out the window. Give an honest opinion that reflects the treatment of the whole situation. Don’t base it on how much you’ve always liked Favre, Rodgers, or the impact it will have on your Fantasy Football team.
So what’s your take on the issue? Sound off on here and let your voice be heard!
(Who knows? Maybe it’s the “Madden Curse” rearing it’s ugly head!)
Tags: Aaron Rodgers, Brett Favre, ESPN, Green Bay Packers, NFL
August 6th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
first of all, i want to say i am a huge favre fan and i will do my best and try not to be biased. i got all teary-eyed when he retired and it actually pulled on my heart strings a little when he did. i don’t even know what that really means. i just know it brought out the softer side of brett which in turn brought out the softer side of me. all that said, i am very disappointed in the packers organization. i think they have treated favre like crap and this has been nothing but a big game to them. they owe everything to favre and the least they could do would be to let him move on. whether that means releasing him or trading him, they OWE it to him. they forced him to make a choice in march about retirement. MARCH!!!! he just got finished with a crazy good season and was tired of football at the time and somebody wants to ask him for an answer then? what kind of sense does that make? every athlete wants to retire right after the season!!! professional sports is a very hard job. baseball plays 162 games a year. that doesn’t even count if they make the playoffs. hockey and basketball play 82 games a year. that is a lot of games. most people would say that a football season is really short and should be easy in comparison to these other sports. i don’t know about anyone else, but i don’t think i could go week in and week out getting hit by some of the quickest, biggest, hardest hitting athletes in the world and feel like continuing to play by the time march came around. he deserves better than that. now for brett. i, by no means, think he handled it correctly. he did take to long to decide he wanted to come back and i also think that once he did decide he should have applied for reinstatement and reported to camp immediately. he should have made the packers do something before now. i think that he has been too nice to their organization and he has done everything he could to not cause a controversy. they just continue to drag this out. i think they just know they are wrong and don’t want to lose him deep down. they even tried to buy him off so that they didn’t have to play against him. anyways, i have vented enough. i apologize for not capitalizing any names or anything else that needed capitalizing. i stink at typing. thats my two cents.
August 7th, 2008 at 10:57 am
The Packers lack of a true owner and decision maker killed them in this situation. I understand that they wanted a decision from Favre in March – the draft was coming and they needed to know how to pick. Favre met his end of the agreement and gave them a decision based upon how he felt at the time. He could have been a jerk like Strahan was last year and just kept quiet for forever and then shown up at camp. He had no contractual obligation to tell them what his intentions were so early.
I understand the Packers situation and I don’t think it has anything to do with Aaron Rodgers. I think it has to do with them drafting Brian Brohm and wasting a pick on a quarterback that they didn’t need if Brett comes back. They paid a bunch of money to Brohm and to Rodgers and then they would have had to pay out $12 million this year to Brett. I’m convinced that’s why they offered him $20-25 million over 10 years – it’s cheaper.
The Packers proved that sports at the highest level is a business and sent a message, granted a message that’s already been sent a hundred times by other organizations, to all players that the business (money) trumps everything. Brett can now earn his money in New York – guarantee you that he’ll be much more careful about retirement the next time around.