High Drama for Green Bay Packer Fans

It's another dicey day in Wisconsin, and anywhere there is a Green Bay Packer's fan. The drama of Brett Favre's "un-retirement" has team management and fans up in the air emotionally.

Yesterday, Sunday July 13, 2008, two brothers staged a rally outside Lambeau Field with about 200 hundred attendees. The rally was in support of Brett Favre and getting him reinstated as the starting quarterback of the Green Bay Packers.

The brothers intend to stage these rallies each Sunday at 12 noon, with supporters welcome and encouraged to attend. As an additional support to the victims of flooding earlier this summer, attendees are encouraged to bring canned foods.

These guys are serious. They have a website: www.bringbackbrett favre.com and a myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/bringbackbrettfavre that at this writing has over 400 friends signed on. The website is sponsored by DailyBank Corp.com and shows over 70,000 hits to the site.

There are Brett Favre bumper stickers, t-shirts, and yard signs for sale. Visitors to the site can vote on whether to make Favre the starting quarterback once again and whether general manager Ted Thompson should be fired.

The Packer's are a publicly owned franchise; this community takes their football seriously.

Greg Durham of We Ask America commissioned Serafin & Associations to take a poll of Green Bay residents to determine where they stood on the Favre issue. Not a random poll, this poll was done by calling everyone listed in the white pages.

21,000 people answered their phones; a number Durham says is unusually large and indicates the importance of the football franchise to the community.

Of those answers, 74% said the team should keep Favre-not trade him. 33% of the respondents felt Favre should be the starting quarterback for the team this upcoming season. 19% felt Favre should be the back-up quarterback and 15% said they felt Favre should stay as a player/coach. Only 17% of those who answered their phones favored trading Favre. (The Wall Street Journal Market Watch).

At this point, team management isn't moving off the mark of having Aaron Rodgers as the starting quarterback for the Packers as the season unfolds. I can't imagine being in Rodgers shoes these days and wonder if his effective management of the team on-field will be detrimentally affected by the high drama.

There can be no doubt to the total commitment to the game of football--Packer football-that Brett Favre showed for sixteen seasons, nor any doubt about the commitment of Packer fans to Favre. There is a time to put emotions aside, though, and go about the business of doing what is best for the team overall. There are fifty-one other players on that team, and they deserve the support of the community as well.