One of the hardest things to take when I was living in WI was the worship of Brett Favre. He does the “good ole boy” shtick well but he’d already become the NFL version of Roger Clemens, a prima donna pampered and fawned over beyond far beyond the proper concept of “team.” "Oh, no, Brett, pleeaassseee don't retire, come throw more interceptions this year." Recently he’s been bitching about how his Packers didn’t get Randy Moss from Oakland when everybody and his dog knows what a dog Moss is.
Walsh described a play in a loss to the Cleveland Browns in which a play-action pass was called and Moss was asked to run a square-in on the weak side. The linebacker was sucked up inside by the fake, according to Walsh, and Moss was expected to run the in-route behind him into the open area. As Walsh recalled it, "He runs a 9 [deep go] route.
"Andrew Walter was at quarterback. He makes the play-fake and a huge hole opens up for Randy in the middle of the field but he's running down the sideline. Walter nearly threw his arm out pulling the ball back. When Randy gets to the sidelines, [wide receivers coach] Freddie Biletnikoff says, 'What were you doing?'
"Randy told Fred, 'I didn't feel like running the 6 route on the dirt part of the infield.' That's the Randy I coached. There were some games where out of 28 plays he'd have 13 or 14 busts. Wrong routes, wrong reads. Dogging it. Whatever."
Perhaps this is why we don’t let Brett do surgery.
Meanwhile, here’s the QB any sensible NFL fan should be admiring.
"This city cannot be forgotten,'' [Drew] Brees told me last week from a Habitat jobsite, Musicians Village, in the Upper Ninth Ward, where he'd summoned some of his Sigma Chi brothers currently in school around North America to work for a week. "We need to make sure people keep coming here and seeing the progress this city's making and coming here to support the rebuilding.''
My problem, quite frankly, is the rebuilding is too slow. This country should be mobilized by the federal government, like yesterday, to attack the reconstruction of a tattered city.
"It's great to see all these Americans getting together to help rebuild New Orleans,'' Purdue student A.J. Alley said, "but I definitely thought we'd see the area further along after Katrina. There's a skyscraper downtown that still has windows blown out. There's a level of destruction here that you'd expect to see a few days after a hurricane, not almost two years.''
Good for Brees, who housed and fed about 105 volunteer students, and good for the hotels who made deals with Brees to put the kids up, and good for the kids, who worked through Saturday afternoon.
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