Absolutely Favre-u-lous

So I realize that I haven’t written anything in a month and a half…but only one thing could get me back to writing; Brett Lorenzo Favre. Yes the “heroic” quarterback of your Minnesota Vikings (after his one year detour in New York, and..ahem…his career in Green Bay). As you can tell by my tone, I’m not much of a Favre fan. His act of blaming everyone else for the Packers bad play – even though he had let his mechanics go to pot and was about half the quarterback he was in the Holmgren glory days – got old with me pretty quickly. The sad end to his Green Bay tenure and his tour around the NFL after the fact was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In other words, you can probably call me a “hater”. So in the interest of fairness, I want to lay out the positives from the Vikings overtime loss to the Saints on Sunday.

1) Favre played great; he threw for over 300 yards and for most of the game was the smart, ageless QB he’s been all year long. Some of his throws were just amazing for any quarterback, much less a 40 year old

2) His offensive teammates let him down big time. The Vikes were credited with 6 fumbles with Adrian Peterson leading the way with 2 (the fumbled exchange was credited to Favre, even though AP clamped down on the ball with his hands, instead of letting Brett put it in his breadbasket – where I come from, that’s on the running back)

But with all that said, I have to talk about the point I’ve stressed with Brett Favre for years now; he has a funny habit of throwing away the biggest games at crunch time. Happened 2 years ago against the Giants in overtime…happened in 2003 against the Eagles when he threw that moon ball that Brian Dawkins picked off to set up the game winning TD…happened with his 6 interception game against the Rams in 2001…and it happened again on Sunday.

Now some folks, whose opinions on football I respect, have had all kinds of rebuttals on the final interception against the Saints, mostly ranging from his team let him down, to no one play lost the game, to he was in the heat of the moment. Can’t say I agree with any of those, but people are entitled to them. Here is what I saw…

After the Vikings got that horrible 12 men in the huddle penalty, they had a 55 yard field goal in their pocket, with a pretty good kicker on the sidelines, and this is key, the ability to run the clock all the way down to hardly any time left before using their time out. Not to say a 55 yarder is a chip shot by any means but it’s worth a shot if a miss leads to overtime. The 3rd down play, which according to Favre was called before the penalty and the time out that preceded it and was unchanged, was a roll out (quarterback moves toward the sideline – usually makes for an easier throw and he has the ability to run for yardage if there is some there). At this point I’m sure the coaches said the following; “make a safe throw, run it if you’ve got open space (because they still had a timeout to stop the clock) or throw it away”. At first Favre followed number one (as he didn’t force the intended throw), he didn’t do number 2 (because he wasn’t sure if he could get enough yardage to matter) but he sure has hell didn’t do number 3 as he threw across his body, back into the middle of the field (the cardinal sin for a quarterback). Anyway the ball gets picked, no field goal try for the Vikings, and the Saints get the ball first in overtime and never give it back. In this case, even a short run wasn’t death for Minnesota as remember, they still had a timeout, good field position and a chance to let Favre sling it to get another first down.

In my 4 most recent years of coaching youth football (ages 8-11) we’ve run a variation of the same roll out that Favre did on Sunday. We always tell the kids, if the guy isn’t open, run it. Most of the time (I’d say 80%) the kid either hits the open guy or takes off running. You’d think that a future Hall of Famer, who’s had almost 20 years of NFL football under his belt would be able to make the decision 100% of the time, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case for Viking fans on Sunday.

I told pretty much everyone I knew, that for reasons I outlined earlier, I wished that Favre’s 2009 season would end like it did in 2007…throwing the game losing interception. While there was a lot of hope in that, there was also some insight to the dream/prediction; after all, I’d seen the movie before.

Brett Lorenzo Favre – leader in Career playoff interceptions: 30 (2 on Sunday broke his tie with Jim Kelly); His playoff record since losing to the Broncos in Super Bowl XXXII at the end of the 1997 season…4-7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHbh-kt-PFA