According to this ESPN article, LaVar Arrington has signed a 7 year, $49 million dollar deal with the New York Giants, which makes Harry Sydney (who played for the Super Bowl Champion 49ers, coached for the Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers, and can now be found in the afternoons on Green Bay’s WDUZ “The Fan”) look like a genius when other talking heads in the Green Bay sports talk arena were saying we should wait until after the draft to decide whether to pursue both Arrington and Charles Woodson. Sydney realized that time does not stand still for the Packers, and that if they don’t bite when the worm comes by, it might not be cast our way again.
But I have a funny feeling about this signing. It was publicized that Arrington had called Favre by telephone while Green Bay was showing interest in him, and nothing has come out about the topic of that call. Was he calling to fire up Favre to stay? Was he asking if Favre would stay, telling Favre that if Brett wasn’t going to return, he wouldn’t want to be here either, knowing the team would have an extrodinarily vertical hill to climb if they needed a new QB on top of the laundry list of other things the team would need? I guess nobody will ever know.
But this might show a little about the road Brett is opting to take this season, and for the rest of his football career.
And I might be overthinking all of this. It could be that Mike McCarthy was going to have too much on his hands with this team to also have to handle the fireworks that would most certainly accompany Arrington. A well-heeled Joe Gibbs had a hard time reigning him in - a freshly minted coach like McCarthy might have an even harder time keeping the ship headed in the right direction. If this is the case, they best not consider Woodson, either. He was more than some coaches could handle with the Raiders, and a big fish in a big pond like that might just swallow up whole a new coach like McCarthy.