I guess it had to happen sooner or later, but I still wasn't ready for Brett Favre to retire. Obviously, no one plays in the NFL forever, and quarterbacks take a fair amount of punishment over the course of a season. But seeing Brett Favre go is like losing something I could always rely on.

I am 28, I remember a lot of NFL games before Favre broke into the league. So it's not like losing part of my childhood or my youth. It's just that Favre was the last of the great old style of NFL quarterback. Now we have the two Mannings, Brady and the rest who are sort of manufactured, prepackaged automatons on and off the field. Their play is pretty much the same, their sound bites are pretty much the same. They just aren't that interesting.

Sure Peyton Manning is in every third commercial for every fifth product and we get the rundown on all of Tom Brady's sordid off-field dalliances, but that doesn't make them stand out from the herd of celebrities that stalk the media landscape these days. And I think an NFL quarterback should stand out. Like Namath having the guts to rock pantyhose in that creepy ad campaign or sport a man fur on the sidelines. Or like Don Meredith (even though he was already retired and broadcasting at the time) who introduced MNF fans to a game in Denver saying: "Welcome to the Mile High City, and folks that's about how I feel right now."

Yeah, Favre had a recurring problem with the huge interception at the exact wrong time, but at least he had daring. A guy has to do a lot for his team just to get them into a position where he can kill them with a bad throw. And while Favre did make his share of mistakes, he did it with style. So now he leaves the NFL with Manning, Brady and their peers who talk like Junior Simple but cut a nice figure in a fancy suit. And I think we're all just a little bit the worse off for it.

Speaking of the NFL, I am enjoying the offseason moves for the Philadelphia Eagles. As one of TO's biggest fans, I still enjoy seeing the Eagles in the process of imploding. When all is said and done after this season, it will be the signing of Asante Samuel that draws the most attention, whether it works or fails. But as ludicrous as it was to give him a six year, $55 million contract, it isn't the worst decision the Eagles could have made, or did make for that matter.

That dubious honor has to go to the Eagles' front office brain trust who decided to slap the franchise tag on tight end LJ Smith. In case you don't know, the franchise tag forces the team to offer the player a one year deal equivalent to the average of the top three salaries at his position. So that means if you're franchising a guy, you probably ought to be damn sure that he is one of the three best players in his category in the league today.

There is no way LJ Smith is a top three tight end in the NFL. Perhaps he is as talented as draft gurus and Eagles execs have claimed, but I think if that were the case he'd have proved it by now. Hell, even Kellen Winslow II has had a breakout season, and he's been in the league half as long and missed almost two entire seasons to boot.

Out of curiosity, can you even tell me that LJ Smith is a top three tight end in the NFC East? Would you rank him ahead of Jason Witten, Chris Cooley and Jeremy Shockey? I don't think I would. And that's not even beginning to compare him to guys like Ben Watson or the likes of Gates and Gonzales.

Now, it may be that the Eagles franchised him in the hopes of trading him, but who the hell would give up anything of significance for LJ Smith, let alone two first round picks? I think if I were an NFL GM, I'd demand a late second day pick included in a package for LJ Smith where I had to send nothing back in return, or maybe a used kicking tee and worn out down and distance markers.

There are at times, other concerns when it comes to franchising or not franchising a player than simple statistical production. But is LJ Smith so important to the Eagles (who didn't even make the playoffs last season) that the entire football landscape in the City of Brotherly Love that the whole thing would collapse if he left town? This just might take the cake for dumbest decision made in the NFL this offseason, at least until the Eagles draft in April.

In other matters, Mountain Dew has come out with a new marketing campaign. It is called Green Label Art, and they are selling their product in limited edition aluminum bottles featuring six distinct designs from six of America's edgiest up and coming artists. I bet you James McNeil Whistler is shaking in his boots in the afterlife, fearing that his place at the pinnacle of artistic achievement in American history is about to come to an end.

When I saw this campaign, it reminded me of a scene from the classic film "The Third Man." The character played by Orson Wells delivers a famous line:

"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly."

If one were to modernize that quote to describe America today, I suppose one could say that we've had 220 years with a few ups and downs, but with unprecedented security, peace and prosperity and we produced six tools who adorned a soda that is little more than citrus flavored rat poison with six "works of art" that make a sane man want to weep for the future. I shudder to think that there will come a time when a person who owns unopened bottles with these images on them will make a fortune on eBay. What a world.

I think Jerry Garcia said it best when he said...

There are some occasions when I wish I were a Patriots fan. Not to enjoy this undefeated season in the making, not to jump on the bandwagon and not to find out if, as the old saying goes, ignorance is bliss. But to be able to quip after the Patriots bye this week that the NFL finally found a way to stop the Pats from scoring. I imagine that if I were as dumb as the average Pats fan, I could convince myself that I were clever dropping a line like that.

Thanks to Mike Shanahan's hesitation and a fair-sized hangover, I left Travis Henry in my fantasy lineup this week. So his DNP didn't help, and Manning's epic six interception performance still ending up netting 21 points thanks to a FFL commissioner whose struggles with incompetence should make him the subject of a made-for-TV movie of the week, I came in to tonight's game trailing by 1.5 points. All I needed was one catch for six yards from 49ers TE Vernon Davis to win. That didn't seem like an unreasonable expectation, did it?

Of course, with the brilliant pass protection scheme of the San Francisco offense keeping Davis in for max protection, even though it didn't work at any point in the game, that simple hope was doomed from the start.

This season has forced me to face an unpleasant reality. So much attention has been paid to Tony Romo's new contract, Brett Favre's milestones, Peyton Manning's Super Bowl championship and Tom Brady's illegitimate kid and amazing stats. But there has been a vast, dishonest, corrupt conspiracy to divert attention away from the greatest quarterback in the game - Matt Hasselbeck. With the way he put up numbers against the 49ers in tonight's game, the NFL must waive the whole retirement for five years requirement to induct him into the Hall of Fame immediately.

I've been wondering why Hasselbeck is shunted aside in favor of guys like Manning and Brady. It can't be a question of talent, numbers or overall success. It has to be because he's bald and he has that sad little emasculated voice that distinguishes true he men like Hasselbeck and Bill Simmons. Hell, field generals like Joe Montana and Johnny Unitas wish they could have an epic moment like the overtime playoff game when Hasselbeck announced over the stadium PA when the Seahawks won the coin toss that the Hawks would take the ball and win the game. Alas, Hasselbeck threw an INT which Al Harris returned for the winning TD.

It must be a conspiracy, though. It can't be because Hasselbeck is barely above-average at his position. Nor can it be that he is more prepared to provide an excuse for his failure than to drive his team to success. Nor can it be tied to the fact that he plays in a dick town whose most notable football tradition was shamelessly ripped from Texas A & M. As an aside, why couldn't Seahawks fans have stolen the bonfires which collapse and kill the builders instead of the 12th man.

Unfortunately, the story didn't garner the national attention it deserved, but Hasselbeck and his teammates made sure to remind themselves of Super Bowl XL prior to this season's meeting with the Steelers. They brought motivation from the bad calls which they felt deprived their team of the championship they so richly deserved. Whether it was because he spent too much time reading his playbook out loud to clam his children, because State Farm wasn't there for him, because they dwelt too much in the past or because the Steelers are just that much better, the Seahawks were soundly beaten.

This game against San Francisco is fairly typical of Hasselbeck's career. The Seahawks came in expected to win, even without Deion Branch and Shaun Alexander. San Francisco has been dreadful all season, no matter how much they spent this offseason. And Hasselbeck was throwing the ball all over the place. He's always very good in the games he's expected to win. But when the team plays a better team, he folds.

I said all that because Steve Young appeared in the broadcast booth tonight, complaining that Hasselbeck is ignored because he plays in the Pacific Northwest and toils on a team with very little tradition of excellence, so they don't draw media attention. That isn't the case, necessarily. With so much coverage by ESPN, ESPN2 the NFL Network and FSN, with the interest in fantasy football and with the internet, fans have so much access to so much football information at every minute of every day. If fans aren't focused on a player it's performance based, not regional bias. Maybe Hasselbeck is the fifth best QB playing right now, but the Grand Canyon separates him from 1-4.

In other news, BC lost again this week. It seems like an annual rite of passage, like the swallows returning to Capistrano in California in March. Thanksgiving approaches, BC controls its own destiny for an automatic berth to a BCS bowl and a .500 team upsets them. And all of a sudden, there is no BCS berth. And then the whining about BC missing out on higher profile bowls because of the perception that BC fans don't travel well begins in earnest.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Super Bowl. I've been trying to determine whether I think the Bears are going to win because of rational or emotional reasoning. I haven't come to a conclusion on that point yet, but I figured I'd go with this post anyway. Plus, I'm under the gun since 2/3 of my 8 readers visit my blog because they're killing time at work, and the work week realistically ended 10 minutes ago, this being Friday of Super Bowl week and all.

You might not know this, if you've come to this blog recently, but in November just before the Colts were about to utterly devastate the Cowboys in Texas Stadium, I suggested that the reigning kings of the uncalled holding penalty (Tarik Glenn and Ryan Diem) would have an incredible amount of difficulty handling DeMarcus Ware in pass protection. My track record on predictions in the history of this site has not been very good, but I was right about that. Maybe Adawale Ogunleye, Alex Brown and Mark Thompson as individuals aren't as talented as Ware, but in a package, I see them having a field day.

There are those who are foolish enough to think that the Indianapolis run defense might have been reborn in the playoffs because their competition had fatal flaws rather than any new schemes or the return of Bob Sanders. Kansas City couldn't pass, Baltimore's offense was schizophrenic and New England refused to run the ball when they really needed to in the final moments of the game. Chicago's wide receivers can stretch the field, they have two running backs who can carry the load. Things could get ugly for Indy, even though Bob Sanders is an evolutionary mixture of Jack Tatum, Mel Blount (not Bugs Bunny, but the NFL Hall of Famer), Jack Lambert, Mel Blount (this time the man of 1,000 voices), Dick Butkis, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and the miracle ingredient X-247.

The Bears do have their X factor, and it isn't Rex Grossman. It's Ron Turner. Will Ron be patient with the run if it doesn't yield instant gratification? If he is patient, there is no reason (not even Booger McFarlane, the 14th best defensive tackle in NFL history to come out of LSU after 4 years) the Bears can't get somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 yards on the ground this week.

I do love the talk about Rex Grossman being the worst quarterback ever to play in the Super Bowl. I have made a habit of deploring the knowledge of NFL history displayed by the average NFL fan every time a statement like this gains credence. Grossman might turn out to be the worst QB ever to play in a Super Bowl, but at least give him a chance to play in the game. What if he throws for 300 yards and 3 TDs?

While you're pondering the question of what QB is the worst to ever play on the biggest stage, you might want to Google Craig Morton. Or Vince Ferragamo. Or Kerry Collins. Or Stan Humphries. Or Craig Morton, again, since he played in two Super Bowls and submitted two ghastly performances. And what will happen if Peyton Manning wilts under the pressure? How ridiculous will every moron who said Rex was the worst Super Bowl QB ever look then. Hell, even if he is awful I won't look too bad because if you do Google those names, you'll see that he isn't the worst.

I think Rex will play well. There is absolutely no pressure on him right now. The expectations for him are so low that he'd have to take the snap, kick Jones or Benson in the groin and run out of the back of the end zone screaming and waving his arms like the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose to disappoint. If he doesn't turn the ball over, takes 2 or fewer sacks and throws for 150 yards and 1 TD, the Bears will win the game.

The Bears defense is much better than the Colts D. Yes, it will be incredibly hard for John Tait to handle Freeny (I'm being very optimistic here), and I'm not too confident that Fred Miller will contain Robert Matthis. But I think the Bears with a mix of short drop/quick throws and max protection can beat the pass rush of the Colts. And if you can beat the Colts pass rush, the rest of their defense is as easily dismissed as the Ukraine in the epic Risk game between Kramer and Newman. Unfortunately without Nick Harper, I don't see any linebacker or defensive back for the Colts to play the role of the large Ukrainian man who stepped up to blow up the board.

I see the Bears winning this game by 14. Maybe 21, since I just saw ESPN footage of the tool from the Subway commercials wandering around Radio Row at the Super Bowl Media Center rocking a Jeff Saturday shirt. You don't wear colors like that. You don't even sport them. You rock a Jeff Saturday shirt. That has torn knee ligaments written all over it for the Colts center. Plus you just know Mariotti and the CHB are picking the Colts to win big.

On another note, I am thrilled that Farve is coming back. More than any other individual, he embodied the NFL of the 1990s. I am just not ready to see him go. Now that every quarterback is required to play with no audacity, Favre is the last guy out there who isn't a cyborg. He's the last of the old school QBs, like Sammy Baugh, Sonny Jurgenson, Charlie Connerly, Frank Skeffington or Terry Bradshaw. I'm sure all the real NFL fans who know what's what will recognize the name I made up in there.