Grit, Guts, & Glorious Winners

Looks like it’s pretty much over.

Finally.

Brett Favre has been a fixture for the Packers for, well, a long time. Longer than I can remember. I really liked having him as a quarterback and am uncertain about his departure.

But the retirement bullshit has been too much this season. I’m sick of it causing distractions, coloring every news report about the Packers, and causing all of football to turn into a game of he said she said mumbo jumbo.

I’ve already talked about it. Anyone with half an inkling about football has talked about it. It’s not worth it to spend much time on it.

However, reading about/watching/ listening to the Packer fanbase tear itself and the players, mostly metaphorically, to pieces causes me pause.

It reminds me why I wanted to get away from Green Bay so badly when I was younger.

Some things Packer fans need to realize/consider:

1) Good and evil, absolutes, dichotomies, and the like do not exist. Especially in football.
2) One player does not make a team… Actually, maybe that is true in cycling (but then one player makes a whole sport). It’s not true in football, though.
3) Regression toward the mean, regression toward the mean, regression toward the mean.
4) Stop yelling stupid, ill conceived, uncouth things at Aaron Rodgers. Wait until you see him play in an actual game to hang him. It’s what I’m doing!
5) The Packers organization is not the devil. Mike McCarthy is a winning coach. Ted Thompson has made sound decisions in the draft and in trades.

Have you heard of AJ Hawk, Greg Jennings, Aaron Rouse, Mason Crosby, and James Jones? Those, among others, are players he drafted. Remember Ryan Grant? I think, you know, those fellows might be good at football. Really. Open a book for once, you’ll see.

So, yeah. The coaching staff and management is not evil. They aren’t trying to destroy the team. That is, in fact, the opposite of their job! That would be like a famous chef attempting to make a chili that is not delicious (unthinkable and impossible). However, if you think that Brett Favre is the sole component of the Green Bay Packers, I can see how you would think the staff is trying to destroy the team. So, finally…

6) If you are not a Packer fan because someone other than Brett Favre is now the quarterback, you are bad at being a Packer fan. When you are a fan of a team, really a fan, you support that team one way or the other. High or low. Winning or losing. Without gunslingers or with gunslingers. You can criticize, but stating that you are no longer a fan of a team because they have a new quarterback probably means that you weren’t ever really a fan. You were probably a fair weather fan. And don’t know about the eighties.

(PS: If any of you “I hate the Packers now because TT AND MM ARE TRYING TO KILL MY BRETT, the gunslinger, blah blah blah, I have season tickets but will never again use them” fans somehow actually have season tickets, can I buy them? I will use the hell out of them.)

I can’t handle reading more about Brett Favre’s un-retirement, or about the accompanying idiocy of some vocal Packer fans not-fans, or about what Peter King thinks he thinks about Brett Favre’s awesome abs.

Looks like it is almost over. Phew.

We, those of us kind-of-rational Packer fans, can now, I hope, get to watching Aaron Rodgers hurt himself coming off of the bench destroy Brett Favre’s team eat a hotdog play a game involving a ball as the starting quarterback of the Green Bay Packers.

It’s about damn time.