the Trent Green situation was ugly. Sheeesh!

The dude’s held the Packers franchise hostage for three or four years now with his annual retirement musings. He can’t commit to football, he doesn’t want to work as hard on preparation every week, he whines about the team not giving him enough to work with when his team went 13-3 off of a good running game and solid defense (and he was the one primarily responsible for losing the NFC Championship game last year with an incredibly stupid throw), he says he doesn’t trust the GM because the GM won’t go out and sign the exact players he wants, and he gripes that the Packers created this situation when it was entirely Favre’s decision to retire.

I’ll say it now, the Packers are better off without him. I suspect the only reason he threw such a hissy fit about Moss is that he was pissed that he had to be more of a game mananger last season in McCarthy’s offense and he hated doing it. Moss, in his mind, would allow him to play the kind of football he wants. He wants to be a gunslinger who throws the ball into triple coverage for the big play because at some point it became more important for Brett Favre to look like the hero rather than doing what it takes for his team to win. That’s why he goes off the reservation in big games like the NFC Championship. That’s why he does stuff like throw 6 INTs in a playoff game. That’s a large part of the reason Green Bay doesn’t win…because he tries to play hero and costs his team big games and for years nobody called him on it because he’s Brett Favre.

Heck, check out his career stats in the playoffs to see what I’m saying. He hasn’t been Brett Favre since Mike Holmgren left in 1998. He’s just been a gunslinging QB who’s as likely to put his team out of a game as to help them advance.

http://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/F/FavrBr00_playoffs.htm

The 1998 playoffs (where they lost to the Broncos in the Super Bowl) was the last year that Favre had Holmgren as his coach. He had one playoff series after that (2004) where he was good all the way through. In all of the others any good performances he had were followed by really horrible ones. Before 1998 his TD/INT ratio in the playoffs was 23/10. Since 1998, his TD/INT ratio has been 16/18. If you check his good to bad game ration pre-Holmgren’s departure you’ll see that the splits definitely favored the good games and that it flipped once Holmgren left.

Simply put, Favre was a far better QB with Holmgren than without (likely because Holmgren was the last coach who could challenge the foolish things Favre did and get away with it) and the biggest problem with his performance is a drastic increase in interceptions (which also increased to a less dramatic degree in the regular seasons). Favre’s become a markedly less-disciplined QB as his career’s progressed, which leads me to believe that some time ago he started becoming the part of the problem in Green Bay rather than part of the solution.