The most important news story in Wisconsin
August 11, 2008
I’m a little bit late to the conversation, but with the first preseason game of the year tonight, it’s better late than never. Rick Esenberg argues that the Packers are planning on losing this year:
There are only two answers to that question that are consistent with Thompson and McCarthy acting for the good of the team. One, they think that the Packers are not ready to win in 2008 and need to develop Rodgers for some point in the future when they will be or, two, they think Rodgers will be a better quarterback in 2008 than Favre.
The latter is silly, so it must be the former. They must think that the fact that they have won 18 of the last 22 games with the same guys who will be on the field this year was a fluke or a function of the schedule. They can’t say it, but they don’t expect a team that was a field goal away from the Super Bowl last year and which lost nobody that mattered to win this year.
I don’t think this is right. I don’t think the latter option is self-evidently silly. I think there’s a very good chance that Aaron Rodgers will have a better season than Brett Favre.
If Favre were to repeat his 2007 season, then obviously, he’d be your guy. But at what level of confidence can you predict a repeat of 2007?
Favre is another year older, and he didn’t spend the off-season staying in shape; he retired! He wasn’t able to pronounce himself 100% committed to returning until very recently. My understanding is that the NFL is a brutal sport which requires large reserves of physical and mental willpower, and in which you need year-round preparation and training to succeed. Especially when you’re 38 years old.
Given all that, isn’t it reasonable to expect that Favre would put up numbers similar to his atrocious 2005 season, or his distinctly mediocre 2006 season, as opposed to the MVP-caliber numbers of 2007?
I don’t know if going with Rodgers is the smart bet, but I don’t think it’s self-evidently bad. I’ll also note that two people who have been able to evaluate both Favre and Rodgers over the last few years, and are in as good a position as anybody to make the bet, are Thompson and McCarthy. And in a “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” sense, they have nothing to gain from an Aaron Rodgers fiasco, and would have had nothing to lose from bringing back Favre. But now they’re going to be subjected to endless scrutiny, and if things don’t go their way, their jobs will be on the line.
The Packers are not in a position in which it makes sense to build for the future. They have a good team with almost everybody coming back, so I tend to discount Rick’s option one. That leaves three options: either Thompson and/or McCarthy have some kind of personal animosity towards Favre to such a degree that they are deliberately acting in bad faith and making their football team worse (for which there is no evidence); or they would have preferred to bring Favre back but they missed their chance and are trying to make the best of a bad situation; or they believe that Rodgers gives the Packers a better chance to win.
My money is on option three.