Thread: Favre Playing Again? Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Brett Favre playing again? What would be the point?

PUBLISHED 1 hour and 50 minutes ago

LAST UPDATED 1 hour and 28 minutes ago






Greg CouchAOL FanHouse Columnist


Brett Favre is like a piece of gum you’ve chewed too long and can’t find a place to spit out. Once you finally do -- thank God! -- you accidentally step in it and can’t get it off your shoe. We just simply cannot get rid of this guy.

“I do think Favre would be interested in talking to a team about returning.”
Brett Favre says his body has taken enough beatings, but Gil Brandt says he could still play. (AP Photo)

That’s what Gil Brandt, former longtime exec and VP of player personnel for the Dallas Cowboys, said in a chat on NFL.com. Not two years ago. Not last year. He said it on Tuesday. I now see the first good reason for the lockout.

Brandt has been out of the league for years, and doesn’t say that he has spoken with Favre. But he’s still well connected and well regarded.

Maybe Favre-talk is just a comedic break to fill the void left by the lockout. But we are talking about Favre here. Is it really hard to believe?

Also, if Brandt is wrong, then it would have been awfully easy for Favre to have shot it down by now. A few weeks ago, he worked his inaugural 7-on-7 high school football camp on the Southern Mississippi campus.

Could he still play?

“I can still throw the ball as well as I ever have,”he told the Sun Herald newspaper. “No question about that.”

Does he want to play: “I don’t want to put my body through that anymore. I’ve been beat up enough.”

That does not sound like someone slamming a door shut. This could be Favre’s Willie Mays moment, not the over-the-shoulder catch moment, but the falling-down-in-the-outfield moment.

Favre’s brilliant legacy has already been replaced by a joke and a carnival. David Letterman did Top 10 “Brett Favre Excuses” last year during the Jenn Sterger sexting scandal. No. 8: An autograph seemed so impersonal. No. 2: If I can’t text inappropriate photos, then the terrorists have won.

Last year, one year too many, Favre played for the Minnesota Vikings. Late in the season, he had a hurt shoulder and shouldn’t have played against the Chicago Bears. But he did, on the frozen turf at the University of Minnesota, where the game was moved when the Metrodome caved in. Favre was knocked out the game when Bears end Corey Wooten slammed him to the turf.

That was the last time Favre played. No one wants to go out that way, much less the NFL’s ironman. And he was asked at the time if he was done. “I don’t know with this concussion,” he said. “Based on my decision-making, I probably shouldn’t tell you one way or the other right now. “I don’t regret it. I wish it would have turned out differently.”

It seemed almost impossible for Favre’s career to end any worse, with injury, bad play and a season-long embarrassing personal scandal. But if he comes back, the jokes will continue, the play won’t get better, the body will continue to break down. The concussions will add up.

And at this point, his story is starting to get sad. If he plays again, it will appear that he just doesn’t know what to do with his life after football, as if he’s so scared of it that he’s willing to suffer another year of ridicule and humiliation.

Of course, great players have a hard time fully accepting it, or even recognizing it, when their magic goes away. Favre is 41 now, and still telling newspapers that he can throw the ball as well as he has ever been able to, “no question about that.”

Brandt said he doubted any team would want Favre as a starter.

And it’s hard to see Favre willing to be a backup, either. He has never seemed interested in serving as a mentor to young quarterbacks, and no backup quarterback is worth the kind of circus and distraction to a team that Favre would bring, anyway.

Even if someone were willing to give him a starting job, he couldn’t lead a team to a Super Bowl anymore anyway. So what’s the point?

The point is that Favre has never known how to leave. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell tried to let him go out nicely, putting off making a decision on Favre’s sexting thing all season last year. A question of sexual harassment from a dirty old quarterback should have been taken far more seriously.

But whatever. Goodell gave Favre a $50,000 fine and let Favre leave on his own terms. Unfortunately, there weren’t any good terms left for Favre to leave on. There still aren’t any.

A great story was just destined for a bad ending. They don’t all have a happily ever after






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