I know that Brett Favre says he doesn’t have anything left to prove. He’s gone to 2 Superbowls and won one of ‘em. He’s been the league’s MVP three times. He’s the reigning Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year. He owns just about every record a quarterback can own (of both the good and the bad). He’s beaten every team in the league (the Kansas City Chiefs were the last team on Favre’s “To Do” list, and he scratched them off in week 8). He’s done more than almost every other person who’s ever professionally warmed their hands between a center’s legs.
But Favre is wrong.
Or he’s lying.
And he knows it.
He has one more thing to prove, and if you watched that game on November 29th in Dallas, you know what that thing is. That one thing on his football checklist he has yet to accomplish. He needs to travel to Dallas and beat them on their field.
If you saw the game, you saw how he was playing like he did a decade ago. Remember those times? Remember how the first quarter of every big game (sometimes every game) was like watching Stooges football? Favre was so nervous and amped about the game that he threw 100mph fastballs into the dirt, 30 rows up, or sent them ricocheting 60 feet off a defender’s chest? It was common knowledge among fans and expectantly discussed by the sportscasters during the game.
Each game would start and I’d huddle around the TV with friends and we’d mutter to ourselves “C’mon, Brett. Just keep it together for the first quarter this time.”
We saw that old Favre again in Dallas on November 29th. A grizzled NFL veteran that’s seemingly seen and done it all was still as jumpy as a pimply-faced teenage boy trying to unclasp a girl’s bra for the first time. His throws were bad, judgment questionable - all vintage Favre. Only this time he didn’t get the chance to write his own ending because of the injuries he suffered in the game.
Not like it would have mattered. Dallas was better than Green Bay that night.
But he knew it and you could see it - he hadn’t proved to himself that he could beat Dallas in their house. And he needs to.
That the Bears beat the Packers to help force this issue should these two meet in the NFC championship is simple karma. If through some twist of fate the Packers would have run the table and Dallas lost another game, bringing Dallas to Green Bay for the conference championship, it would have seemed like we dodged a bullet. A bullet that scared the shit out of us. A bullet Favre needs to man up and face.
Packer History 101 starts with the Ice Bowl. In 1967, Dallas came up here and lost. Quarterback Bart Starr, close to the end of his career when this defining moment in his career and Packer Green Bay (even Wisconsin) history occurred, owned the city back then.
Favre owns the city today and likely won’t be throwing around leather professionally for too much longer. He’s got a team right now that’s scary good, but nobody’s quite sure which; scary or good.
It’s like an historical double-helix, a strand of football DNA that wraps back around every 40 years to almost the identical place it was back in ‘67, when Starr walked off the frozen turf at Lambeau, victorious over the vaunted Cowboys.
Favre has to travel to Dallas and beat the Cowboys. Our football DNA calls for it. Karmic symmetry requires it. So does that nagging feeling in the pit of Favre’s stomach. Beat Dallas in Dallas and he truly has nothing left to prove.
The table is set for Brett Favre to serve one more feast of a game.
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