Packers, Favre begin a new era ...Team, star QB move on, but fans remain divided

Packers, Favre begin a new era ...Team, star QB move on, but fans remain divided

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Packers, Favre begin a new eran ...Team, star QB move on, but fans remain divided

BY PETE DOUGHERTY
pdougher@greenbaypressgazette.com

Green Bay Packers fans surely were stunned and some appalled when they saw Brett Favre holding up his signature No. 4 jersey for the cameras Thursday in Cleveland, but for the New York Jets and not for the Packers franchise he’s come to embody over the past 16 years.
The Packers’ top management team – President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Murphy, General Manager Ted Thompson and coach Mike McCarthy – held a press conference earlier in the day to clean up some of the debris from the storm of the past two months and explain why Favre won’t be in a Packers uniform this season after ending his brief retirement.

But a 38?-minute session with reporters discussing Favre’s trade late Wednesday night failed to reveal any unvarnished reason or reasons for the disintegration of the team’s relationship with perhaps its all-time great player and his absence from training camp after he tried to return to the club this summer.

“It was never a matter of if Brett Favre can play,” McCarthy said. “He finished No. 2 in the league in MVP voting (last season) I think someone said. He's still in all of our (video) cut-ups. I'm very in tune with what his level of play is. That was never the factor. In my opinion, and based on our communication, and all the communication throughout all this process, I was never truly convinced that he was going to play. Now, he wants to play. He should play. We got to a tough spot, and this is why it ended up why we're here (Thursday).”

Thompson has full authority over the Packers’ football operations and ultimately determined the team’s course over the past two months, and those actions clearly demonstrated he didn’t want Favre back. The Packers tried hard to persuade Favre to remain retired, resisted his return until he was officially reinstated from the reserve/retired list this past Sunday, and then did nothing to assuage Favre’s concerns about their commitment to him in his long meetings Monday and Tuesday with McCarthy and Thompson.

Interviews with sources inside and outside the organization suggest Thompson might have had several reasons for wanting to move beyond Favre. Some said, notwithstanding McCarthy’s previous comment, that Thompson harbored serious doubts about Favre’s ability to take the Packers to a championship at age 38 after poor performances in ultra-frigid conditions last year against Chicago and the New York Giants. Others pointed to underlying reasons such as the feeling of being held hostage by the yearly drama of Favre’s possible retirement, and perceiving a growing aloofness in Favre as the quarterback became significantly older than almost all his teammates.

Thompson, though, with stated support Thursday from Murphy and McCarthy, gave only vague reasons for wanting to move beyond the Favre era in his first comments since the whirlwind of the past five days, which started with Favre flying into Green Bay on Sunday night.

“I do think you make commitments and you say, ‘OK, we're going to try to do this. It’s a difficult task but we’re going to try to do it,’” Thompson said of moving on after Favre’s retirement.

Both McCarthy and Thompson regularly used words such as “impasse” to describe the estrangement and said that while they were willing to open the starting quarterback job to a competition after Favre’s reinstatement, their face-to-face talks with Favre this week never got past rehashing the wounds from an acrimonious offseason. But the coach and GM never revealed why they didn’t try to get through that sticking point by offering Favre the olive branch he clearly was seeking.

“We both agreed that both parties could probably have done things better from a communication standpoint,” McCarthy said of his talks with Favre this week, “and that's what I stated the other day when I was up here. We agreed to disagree. We were on opposite sides of the fence of (perceiving) what happened, how we got to this spot, but we're into this spot.”

Favre acknowledged his differences with Thompson, though he didn’t mention Thompson by name, and disappointment at what he considered ungrateful treatment by the organization, at his introductory press conference with the Jets, who played at Cleveland on Thursday night.

“A lot of things happened in the offseason, a lot of shocking things,” he said. “I think we’re both at fault. Who’s at fault more is a matter of opinion.”

Back at the Lambeau Field auditorium, Murphy opened the press conference with a statement in which he thanked Favre and his family for all they’d done for the Packers and then threw his full public support behind Thompson’s and McCarthy’s handling of what’s been one the most divisive episodes in franchise history.

“I want to really stress, the three of us have been in complete agreement on every single decision that we have made in this process,” Murphy said. “I have tremendous respect for both Ted and Mike. Ted has been a true professional through this whole process. In my view, he has no ego. His thought process in every decision is what is in the best interest of this organization. I thought it was really masterful the way that Ted has handled this situation, particularly the trade, in unison with (team vice president) Russ Ball and (director-football operations) John Schneider.”

The Packers undoubtedly got what they wanted, considering Favre was set on returning this year. They didn’t want him playing for them, they didn’t want him in the NFC North, and then when it got down to trading him to the New York Jets or Tampa Bay, they wanted to send him to the relative oblivion of the Jets in the AFC, rather than to the team Favre next wanted to go to, the Bucs, who are in the NFC and on the Packers’ schedule this year.

But in the longer term, by trading Favre and going with fourth-year pro Aaron Rodgers at quarterback, Thompson’s legacy will in large part be defined by how this monumental decision pans out, because Favre wanted to return to a team that had advanced to the NFC championship game last season. Winning will keep Thompson’s job, but he always will be known as the man who ran Brett Favre out of Green Bay.

“I don't think anybody would be comfortable with that,” Thompson said. “This is in many ways sad that this is where it came to. At the end of the day though, I think all parties involved felt like (the trade) was the best solution to a very difficult situation. Hopefully we can do things going forward that maybe people will not remember that.”

One of the few things that Favre, McCarthy and Thompson appeared to agree on was a terrible communication gap throughout this standoff. Perhaps the Packers didn’t take seriously enough Favre’s stated desire to return, because they appeared to put him off from mid-June until he filed his reinstatement papers just before the start of training camp in late July. Favre, in turn, didn’t fully appreciate the organization’s desire to move on.

But there’s also questions about why it took so long to resolve these problems when they could have been addressed weeks ago. Favre first broached the subject of his release on June 20. If the sides conducted this week’s meetings back then, the Packers might have traded Favre well before the start of camp, thus saving the players from this divisive ordeal while at camp trying to get ready for the season.

Thompson pointed to Favre’s reinstatement as the move that proved the playing commitment the Packers had doubted, and that set all action in motion. But hoping to wait out Favre and trading anonymous-sourced stories in the media proved destructive to both the Packers and Favre. Thompson said he will conduct a post-mortem of the ordeal and acknowledged a “communication breakdown.”

“I don't have all of the answers in terms of what we could have done to have done this better,” Thompson said. “I do think that we tried to do the best that we could all of the time, but I'm not sure that we didn't make mistakes.”