My Official Green Bay Packers blog

That’s right, readers of this frequently loved but oft-maligned Green Bay Packers blog. You can win yourself your very own Brett Favre replica jersey made by Reebok.

Even better? You get to choose whether it’s a Packer jersey or a Jets jersey. If you want to remember past Sundays of glory, choose the Packer jersey. If you’re a Favre fan 4ever, no matter where he goes, get his name and number on a Jets jersey. Click the links to see each jersey.

Am I pulling cash from my own pocket to bankroll this contest? Surely, you must be kidding. All of this is being made possible by the coolest sports memorabilia people on the planet, SportsMemorabilia.com. If you’re looking for helmets, unis or pictures, either autographed by the athlete or ready to wear (not the pictures, dummy), Sports Memorabilia should be your first stop. Great for gifts, too. Or contests.

Speaking of contests, here’s the rules:

The contest will go on for as long as I deem it necessary, but I want to wrap this up in two weeks or less. So plan on having at least a week to enter, but after that you risk missing my arbitrary deadline.

How do you enter?

Simple. Just comment on this blog entry as to what you think went down to precipitate Favre’s trade to the Jets. But here’s the catch - it has to be interesting. Regurgitate the same tired blah-blah as seen in the 1,302 articles on Favre on ESPN.com and I’ll flush your entry like my morning bowel movement. There’s no min or max word count - just make it creative.

OR

If you are a woman reading this blog and you can’t quite come up with an original spin on the Favre trade, just snap an interesting photo of yourself showing Packer spirit and email it to me at Jeff [at] Green-Bay-Packer.com. Or better yet, write an interesting take AND send a picture with it. Since this is a site visited mainly by men, you can probably figure that the more the photo appeals to men, the better the chances of winning. If you don’t quite get what I’m angling at there, don’t bother entering.

Oh, and this photo rule also applies for uncreative guys who happen to have hot girlfriends or wives. In a nutshell, a comment that makes me laugh coupled with a photo of a female Packer fan that will make other male Packer fans jealous of your life will pretty much win you the jersey.

It is possible to win either by text alone or photo alone. Having both just improves the odds (unless you’re uninteresting AND ugly).

And please, please, please! All photos must be of women who are at least 18 (I’m not expecting nudity here, but I guess I can never be sure what I’m going to get, so I figured I’d better spell out the age thing, just in case). If I’m not sure, I may ask you to prove it. I get myself into enough trouble without having to worry about that. And the person in the picture must be aware of this contest and it’s rules.

The fine print: All entries, textual or graphic, become my property when you send them over, and your entry grants me expressed permission to use your photo and/or written text to promote the site in any manner I want. This will probably mean little more than having a page on the site dedicated to the entries, but if Deadspin comes calling with a big check, I may just give it all up.

So let’s have it, Packer Backers.

Technorati Tags: Brett Favre, Jersey, Contest, Jets, Packers, Sports Memorabilia, Text to Tie and Skin to Win

As I was reading through the various articles about Gene Upshaw’s passing a stat popped up that made me choke on my gum:  Upshaw helped shepherd the collective bargaining agreement that saw the union players take home 59.5% of NFL revenues.  Baconpowder?  In 2006 the NFL’s receipts totalled over $6 billion dollars.  59.5% of that is just over $3.5 billion.  Dollars.

If football were construction, I’d call the players on the field the labor.  Their work makes the product, the product in this case being the action of the game.  In construction, a profitable company likely spends 25% or less of all their revenues on labor.  A poorly run company might be closer to 33%.  Get up to two-thirds, and the carpenters are pulling up in Hummers, masons in Benzes.  Who am I kidding - the carpenters are still pulling up in beater pickups, only difference is the bed would be filled with empty Labatt’s instead of Milwaukee’s Best.  And one more thing?  They’d all be on unemployment because the contractor would never get any work, having to charge so much just to pay the ridiculous wages for his help.

As I understand it, the expiration date of the current collective bargaining agreement is coming soon.  Nobody wants to relive 1987 again, but seriously?  Nearly two-thirds of all NFL revenue goes to the manual labor?  That’s gotta change.  I’m not gonna be the guy that says Jerry Jones needs to be able to afford more plastic surgery on his sagging face, but this arrangement is as unbalanced as Pamela Anderson’s, uh, marriages.

By the way - did you know that Milwaukee’s Best had Milwaukee’s Best Girls, too?  I think I could tap that.

Technorati Tags: NFL, Players Association, Billyuns and Billyuns

Gene Upshaw, Executive Director of the NFL Player’s Association and aspiring breaker of Joe DeLamielleure’s neck, died yesterday from pancreatic cancer.  He had only been diagnosed with the disease on Sunday evening.  That’s like two and a half freaking days.

I was never much of a fan of Upshaw as a union honk, mainly because in the radio interviews I heard him do, reason never seemed to enter the playing field when discussing expectations of players.  He fought hard against anything that would make the players more accountable for their actions.  And what the world needs now, is accountability, sweet accountability.  It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.

But the guy was a beast on the field.  A warrior.  The kind of guy you hated playing against you, but loved when he was playing for you.  That’s how I’ll choose to remember him.

It’s also being reported that Joe DeLamielleure, the former NFL lineman who tried to get Upshaw to open up the union checkbook for former players who couldn’t use their arms or legs anymore because of the beatings they took on the field, has canceled the renewal of the Gene Upshaw rider on his life insurance policy.  The rider would allow DeLamielleure’s policy to pay off double if his neck was actually broken by Upshaw.  But you might want to double check the facts on that one.

In all seriousness, what’s with all the pancreatic cancer these days?  It seems to be popping up everywhere, and it’s so damn deadly.   If Patrick Swayze lives for another year, it’ll be the first person I’ve heard of living that long with this disease.

Catch you on the flip side, Gene.

Technorati Tags: Gene Upshaw, NFL, Players Association, Pancreatic Cancer, DeLamielleure by a neck