It’s time for Brett Favre to come home
Well, it finally happened: Brett Favre’s consecutive start streak came to an end last night, the inevitable capper on what’s been a very Treasure Of The Sierra Madre-type season for No. 4 and the Vikings. After once again coming tantalizingly close to a storybook ending to his career in 2009, only to dash his own hopes with disastrously poor post-season decision-making, Favre’s career appears to finally (probably?) be at an end. And what brought on this bitter conclusion? Arrogance, hubris, and most of all greed—for more wins, for more records, for more attention from a football-watching public that, amazingly, seemed not to care all that much about Favre as he stumbled through his last several games.
With the colossal misadventure that has been Favre’s and the Vikings’ 2010 season taking on Biblical proportions with the collapse of the Metrodome’s roof this weekend, we’re not going to take this opportunity to pile on, even if we have taken plenty of shots at the ol‘ gunslinger in the past. Sure, he is still greedy: Soon after it was announced that he wouldn’t be playing Monday, the man who just likes to have fun out there took to his website and starting hawking commemorative footballs marking the end of the streak for the low, low price of $499. And look, we all know Favre is a skeezy cheeseball and an unrepentant phony. But we’re in reconciliation mode. We prefer to think of him now as being far shrewder about bowling over gullible sports-media folk than we ever gave him credit for. Now’s not the time to start holding his humanity against him.
Favre almost certainly is finished now as an NFL quarterback, which means that he’ll soon take his proper place in the football afterlife: as the greatest Packer who ever lived. It’s over, Brett. Time to come home.
