Should I Stay or Should I Go?

The NFC Championship game is over and Brett Favre and his latest potentially former employer, the Minnesota Vikings, have been left on the side of the road to the Super Bowl. That must mean it’s time for Favre to begin his yearly kabuki dance to the tune of the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

As this ritual plays out each late winter/early spring, the radio inside Favre’s head must be on an endless loop of Mick Jones singing “If I go there will be trouble and if I stay it will be double.” Meanwhile the fans of the Vikings, this time, will be holding their collective breath to see if Jesus-in-shoulder-pads will walk across the Great Lakes and back into their open arms.

Favre’s inability to know when to say when isn’t unusual when it comes to professional athletes. To localize the story a bit, Jim Thome just signed a 1-year contract with the Minnesota Twins, putting him two teams short of completing the rounds within the American League Central.

Perhaps Thome signed with the Twins because he thought that the state of Minnesota and the Twin Cities possessed magical powers of rejuvenation as Favre enjoyed an excellent regular season all while complaining about every ache and pain in his aging body. Maybe instead this is Thome’s last stop on a very long career.

In one sense, it seems a bit sad and a bit pathetic to see once great athletes continue to hang on because they seemingly have nothing else to move on to. It’s also a little exasperating to watch Favre play the role of drama queen each off season. But to be fair we do live in a capitalist society and it’s hard to begrudge anyone doing what he can to make a buck. If the owner of the Twins or the Vikings is willing to dole out millions, how are they the bad guys for being willing to take it?

The short answer is that they’re not.

Let’s face it, the life of a professional athlete at the tope level is far more peaches than beans, to quote noted sage Archie Bunker. The salaries make no sense in the context of most everyone else’s daily life. It’s a great, if limited, existence. The song that really should play in their heads is “Money for Nothing.” And if you scour sites life Deadspin on a regular basis, you also learn that for most of them, the chicks are free, too.

And yet both fans and athletes continue to struggle with the question of when enough is enough. It’s one of sports’ great rhetorical questions.

Everyone has their own view on this, of course, and it really is athlete specific. Jim Brown and Barry Sanders, for example, walked away with still plenty left in the tank. As they did so, they left many fans in their wake aching for more. Johnny Unitas looked positively ridiculous riding the bench in San Diego for one miserable season at age 40. For that matter, Joe Montana looked ridiculous in Kansas City.

It’s not just the big names, either. Did anyone really want to see Jamal Lewis back with the Browns this past season? But there he was anyway unable to walk away on his own. In truth he was brought back only because head coach Eric Mangini didn’t feel like there was any other option. Mangini looked at Jerome Harrison and saw a part time back. He also looked at the rest of the roster and saw a bunch of untested rookies.

The plight of Lewis actually illustrates exactly why this issue is such a struggle for everyone involved. When Mangini bit hard and brought Lewis back he didn’t then want to disrespect him by having him stand on the sidelines. As a result he stubbornly trotted Lewis out there game after game, to the exclusion of Harrison mostly, even though it was obvious that Lewis was done.

Indeed, if not for Lewis’ injury, Harrison likely would never have had what turned out to be a break out season. It’s also fair to say that the Browns’ late season win streak, which occurred despite and not because of the quarterback play, doesn’t happen unless Lewis gets hurt. So in a sense, Lewis ended up repaying Mangini’s early season faith by actually getting injured. It probably is the single biggest factor in what saved Mangini’s job.

This kind of situation plays itself out over and over again in city after city, sport after sport. Favre is a Hall of Fame caliber quarterback. But each year he comes back is another year in which the player behind him has a lost season of development. It’s actually why Green Bay forced Favre’s hand. They were tired of promising young quarterbacks that the team would soon be theirs as it became more and more obvious that Favre apparently had no intention of ever retiring.

For the Packers, it’s worked out well. While Favre has been bouncing around the country, Aaron Rodgers has developed into a pretty fair quarterback who still has a decent upside. It’s likely Rodgers wouldn’t even be in Green Bay at all if the Packers management had decided to accede to each of Favre’s demands.

The Twins signed Thome not only because he can still hit the long ball occasionally but also for the so-called “veteran leadership” position. It’s really the same role Mark Grudzielanek will play for the Indians this season. I suppose it’s an important role, but it’s also a roster spot that won’t go to a younger player.

It’s not even that the Twins or the Indians won’t get some level of production out of Thome or Grudzielanek. They will. But at what cost? For the Twins, the cost might be far less than the Indians. They are closer to the playoffs than the Indians and someone like Thome could put them over the top. Is that worth a lost season to a promising rookie? Most would say “yes.”

But for the Indians, the answer is more complex. It’s hard to calculate what a year of development at the big league level really means, but it obviously means something. How would the Indians have known the value of Grady Sizemore had they kept in buried in the minors in favor of somebody who used to be someone who now was just hanging by the bottom rung?

The other side of that argument, or at least the one Eric Wedge always used to put forth, is that you’d rather see that promising rookie play regularly at AAA than occasionally at the big league level. It’s an argument of convenience.

In the case of Wedge, he much preferred the Grudzielaneks of the world anyway. But being a major leaguer is much more than just playing on the field. It’s the bigger crowds, the increased travel. It’s one adjustment after another and stunting that part of a player’s development isn’t healthy, either.

In truth, there isn’t a professional athlete alive that ever completely solved this internal struggle just as there isn’t a team that’s found the right balance. The guess is that Brown and Sanders had moments in the few years after their retirement where they thought they left too soon. And as Favre was picking himself up off the ground last week in New Orleans it had to occur to him that he may be getting a little to old for this stuff.

The irony, of course, is that when they do retire, as they must, then end up in much the same place as other retirees, playing golf. And of all the sports out there, only professional golf has figured out how to solve the problem. It created the perfect way for players to gracefully put themselves out to pasture. It’s called the Champions Tour.

Lingering Items--Jets Preseason Edition

It you’re going to write a game story during the NFL preseason, good luck. The problem with most preseason games is that they lack one and sometimes both critical elements: a game and a story. If you stuck around for the bitter end of the Cleveland Browns’ “game” against the New York Jets on Thursday night, you understand perfectly my point.

There’s really no reason to get into the whole “isn’t the NFL ripping off its fans by charging them full price for preseason games?” rant. The answer is a resounding “of course.” For season ticket holders, just amortize the additional price you pay for the two extra “games” over the cost of the other eight, meaning that the face value of each of your season tickets really is understated by about 25%. Think of it as a hidden tax, the kind politicians who like to take “no new taxes pledges” tend to impose. For the casual fan who actually buys a preseason ticket just to witness the excitement in person, he or she hardly in the best position to complain about the price afterward.

Moving beyond the cost issue, the bigger problem with preseason games is that they are a misnomer. Sure, there are time clocks, referees, kick offs, and punt returns. The vendors sell beer, too. But these are just false positives. Any resemblance between the preseason and a regular season game is mostly imagined.

Thursday’s game against the Jets was instructive mostly to prove that overall point. Quarterback Derek Anderson played one series. Kellen Winslow, Jr., sat out the game as he probably will most of the preseason. The same pretty much goes for nearly all of the starters. For their part, the Jets started a quarterback who, the minute Brett Favre passed his conditioning test, immediately was relegated to back-up, again.

Look around the NFL and the same thing played out in virtually every other preseason “game”. The starters played token minutes in a modest nod of sorts to the saps who attended in person. New England Patriots’ head coach, Bill Belichick, the ultimate fan coach, doesn’t even bother to nod. Tom Brady might as well be in the witness protection program during the preseason. Belichick, like every other NFL head coach, including the Browns’ Romeo Crennel, uses these preseason walk-throughs for the time-honored task of evaluating the group of marginal talents fighting for the last 10 or 12 spots on the rosters, under so-called game conditions. It’s the only reason, I think, they even bother with a clock.

But a clock does not a game make. The first person who saw anything approaching game conditions after the first 10 minutes on Thursday during the Browns/Jets “game” is either the widest-eyed optimist on the planet or the most delusional. It’s a fine line. What you did see is each team’s second and third strings taking on the other team’s second and third strings. This may tell Crennel something about the depth of his team relative to that of the 4-12 Jets, but it wildly undershoots the intended goal, except maybe when it comes to the Browns’ secondary.

Going into this season, there isn’t a fan around who doesn’t already know that the secondary on this team is thinner than the ice John Edwards is skating on these days. The first of many expected cracks in that ice came Thursday night when quarterback Brett Ratliff, the Jets’ presumptive third-string quarterback, completed touchdowns of 70 and 71 yards.
Crennel, offered maybe some unintentional foreshadowing when he said on Saturday, “giving up two plays of 70 yards is never acceptable, But it was just two plays, and you can't make a general assumption based on two plays. Now, if it happens again, then it will cause for concern.” Apparently general manager Phil Savage was even less impressed or already fraught with concern having witnessed the sight of his defensive backfield being burned by David Clowney, a second-year receiver of such little note that the only entry on his New York Jets biography page under “career highlights” is “inactive for three games.” I kid you not. On Sunday, Savage signed two more defensive backs, former Buckeye Brandon Mitchell and former Minnesota Viking Travis Key. What, you were expecting Champ Bailey?
Mitchell and Key are just stop gap measures. Undoubtedly Savage is trying to work some kind of trade or at least hoping that an upgrade awaits him on the scrap heap of other team’s cuts. In the meantime, look for more big plays being given up on defense this preseason as the starting defensive backfield gets plenty of rest this preseason. Crennel may not be concerned just yet, but he probably understands that the health of those starters is far more important to this team’s chances of getting to the playoffs than Anderson’s.
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Early the next morning after the Browns/Jets game (which came much earlier than I would have liked as a result of the weather delay during the first quarter), I flew to New York for the weekend. If you think Brett Favre being traded to the Jets was big news in the big city last Wednesday, it was nothing compared to what transpired the minute the Jets returned home on Friday.
The media was far more obsessed with every move Favre made than such pedestrian matters as, say, the Olympics. There was Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, treating Favre like visiting royalty at City Hall. Jets’ owner Woody Johnson understating it just a tad likened the attention to an Elvis sighting. It was all great fun and surely helped the team sell some Favre jerseys.
At some point, though, the Jets will have to wake up to the notion that the key to their season rests not so much Favre as it is does on the hope that the rest of the team that general manager Mike Tannebaum rebuilt after last season’s disaster comes through. If Favre looks good this season, it will owe mostly to what is most likely to be a greatly improved offensive line highlighted by the signing of former Pittsburgh Steelers’ mainstay, Alan Faneca.
As Browns’ fans can readily attest to, nothing changes the character of a moribund offense like a vastly improved offensive line. As much as things have changed about football, the basics are still the same. The team that controls the line of scrimmage controls the game. The Browns’ Anderson may have been the NFL’s breakout player of the year last year, but he would not have come close to having that kind of season without the additions of first round pick Joe Thomas and free agent Eric Steinbach. The Jets need a similar story this year. Put it this way: given the state of the Jets last season, if Anderson had been their quarterback, Tannebaum still would have traded for Favre.
***
An amusing debate making the rounds right now is whether quarterback Brady Quinn has turned into a dinker and a dunker, afraid of throwing downfield. Thursday’s performance helped fuel that debate. What makes it amusing is not its underlying accuracy but the fact that the debate is taking place at all. Quinn is, after all, a second string quarterback with limited opportunities to impress. If taking advantage of those limited opportunities is the goal, far better, I think, to actually move the team with a more efficient attack than to constantly throw downfield to second and third string receivers on a team that’s thin at the receiver position in the first place.
The real subtext of the discussion is that a supposedly new-found fondness for short passes is the reason Quinn isn’t starting ahead of Anderson. If that helps someone come to some sort of personal resolution over their otherwise mixed feelings on Anderson, so be it. But the reality is that Quinn isn’t starting because Anderson had one of the great seasons of any Browns quarterback and deserves to enter camp without a single question mark hanging over him. It’s a status that isn’t going to change until Anderson is either hurt or demonstrates unquestionably that last season was a fluke. That’s not a bad thing.
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Here’s the first question you might want to ponder as you wait several more days until the next preseason farce: if Syndric Steptoe had been playing for the Jets on Thursday instead of David Clowney, would Savage have found it necessary to sign Brandon Mitchell or Travis Key?

When to Say When

The melancholy drama playing out in Green Bay between Brett Favre and Packers management is a painful reminder that at its core, professional sports is far more about the business than the game. One doesn’t survive without the other, but never forget, as Favre certainly won’t now, that when business imperatives crash head on with personal issues, the business will win every time.

Each day may bring a new wrinkle or two in the on-going Favre saga, but its essential elements are as old as the business, indeed any business: an aging, once productive player who still feels he can contribute vs. a business that must constantly replenish its talent to survive in the long-term.

You can compile a list where this same scenario has played out in any city. Because it’s Favre and because he’s a quarterback, football fans can quickly tick off Joe Montana’s two-year run of sorts with the Kansas City Chiefs, the year Johnny Unitas spent in San Diego and even Joe Namath’s lost year with the Los Angeles Rams as the most obvious examples.

There have been plenty of examples right here in Cleveland. Bill Belichick’s mid-season banishment of Bernie Kosar comes immediately to mind, although fans on both sides of that debate are still arguing whether it was truly a case of diminished skills or the clash of two head-strong personalities. It’s far from the only example. On the other side of it, the Browns seem intent on wringing out whatever might be left in Willie McGinest’s reservoir. In baseball, the Indians tried the same thing with both Steve Carlton and Phil Niekro, two distinguished pitchers who desperately tried to hang on longer than was probably advisable. Arguably, even the Indians’ refusal to resign Omar Vizquel falls into this category.

As much as every situation is different, each also is very much the same: a high profile, Hall of Fame-type player unable to know when to say when and a front office wrestling with a potential public relations disaster. The Baltimore Colts could no more relish the though of turning their back on Johnny U as could the Packers turning away Favre. Each also involves a heavy dose of emotion emanating from every corner.

And, as usual, fans are caught in the middle. Almost universally, they’ll support the player. Fans are far more interested in watching their favorites long past their primes than in retiring too soon. Jim Brown and Barry Sanders may set the standard for retiring on top, but they are as much criticized by parochial interests for retiring too soon.

Packer fans are predictably distraught. The thought of Favre not playing again is as distasteful to them as the thought that he could end up with one of their rivals. That’s why you hear the argument that the Packers are making a colossal mistake in seemingly not allowing Favre to return because by any measure, Favre is a better quarterback than Aaron Rogers. It’s an emotional argument, but it’s also incomplete because Rogers really hasn’t had any opportunity to establish himself and Favre is a Hall of Famer. It’s also an argument that looks back without any appreciation of what is to come.

The better question, but not necessarily the best question, is one that asks which quarterback gives the team the best chance to win the next game on the schedule. Even then, this doesn’t entirely resolve the matter because so much depends on the time frame. In other words, Favre may give the Packers the best chance to win the first game of the season, but is that true for the eighth game of the season? What about the 12th?

Favre may have proven to be the football equivalent of Bruce Willis’ character in “Unbreakable” thus far, but sooner or later the statistics will catch up with him. He will get hurt. If the Packers miss the opportunity in the interim to develop Rogers, a quarterback in whom they also have much invested their chance of winning later drops measurably.

That’s really the right question, isn’t it? What’s best overall for the franchise? Even fans complaining about the perceived unfair treatment of a multi-millionaire would concede that their loyalties ultimately run to the franchise first, the players second. If Favre ends up with the Minnesota Vikings, some fans may buy a purple Favre jersey out of spite, but I can pretty much guarantee you that in two years the Goodwill bins in and around Milwaukee would be filled with those same jerseys.

Unfortunately, defining “overall” is a nearly impossible task, one that makes you appreciate how difficult the job of general manager really can be at times. It’s like the economy; everyone has an opinion on it. Making it even more difficult is the fact that with Favre, just as in most cases like it, the professionals can’t even agree. Certainly if the Packers ultimately release Favre, someone will pick him up, which is at least some validation that Favre can still play in the league. Just as Kosar played some meaningful games for the Cowboys immediately after Belichick booted him from Cleveland, Favre will certainly do something heroic for another team.

That seems to be the real fear of Packers management and it shouldn’t be. Favre may contribute for awhile with another team, but it won’t be for too long. Packers management should take great comfort in the lessons of Montana, Namath and Unitas. Even Belichick wasn’t too far off base when it came to Kosar. Each of these situations should provide as much proof as Packers management really needs that their long-term assessment on Favre isn’t wrong. There may be some gas left in Favre’s tank, but that tank is hardly full.

The Favre case really is a pretty easy one from a distance. Packers management may be exhausted by the yearly ritual of his indecision and are using it against him now to extract a bit of revenge but they should just let it go. If Favre’s a distraction it’s because Packers management has let it become a distraction. What they know in their hearts should guide their actions: Far worse than letting Favre go too soon is hanging on to him too long.