Well, I suspected the Packers had to have something more than phone records. As it turns out, they don’t have phone records AT ALL, according to two separate sources. Not only do the Packers NOT have phone records, but Favre doesn’t even have a Packers-issued phone.

Watch PFT backpedal here.

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• The Favre Smoking Gun

Great post over at PackerGeeks regarding NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell sticking his nose into the Favre situation. Seemingly when he’s not busy insulting our intelligence, the Commissioner takes it upon himself to meddle in whatever team’s affairs he sees fit.

Memo to Goodell: If you would like “to accelerate the process”, tell Hamlet down in Mississippi and his bumpkin agent to file for reinstatement. The Packers are under no obligation to do anything whatsoever with a retired player. Until Favre sends that letter, Thompson shouldn’t do a damn thing. Goodell wants this wrapped up by the start of Packers training camp? Really? What if they settle on a second or third round pick and a player now, only to have two starting quarterbacks go down in the second week of the preseason? The return on Favre’s rights would be much higher then. Thompson’s job is to look out for the interests of the Packers, not the league’s reputation.

And that’s another thing. Goodell is worried about the PR hit? Are you freekin’ serious? This from the man who has basically given a free pass to the Patriots for cheating (repeatedly) and let Adam Jones back in the league. To think that speeding up the arc of the Favre story will make all this “go away” is so beyond stupid, I have trouble even typing it. But that’s what Goodell wants - for it all to go away. He’s on the brink of a brand new season, and one retired player is getting all the headlines. Hell, did you know that Peyton Manning might not even start Week One?

Goodell needs to stop worrying about what the Packers are doing and get to the bottom of what Favre and Childress were talking about on repeated calls between the two. Adjudicating the rules of the league - that’s your job Roger. Not telling the Packers how to do theirs.

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• Woods Nails It

Mike Florio over at Pro Football Talk is a mixed bag. He can break some pretty big NFL stories and start a great rumor with the best of them - all while being a complete jackass.

A perfect example of the latter is on display today in his post regarding Ryan Grant and Grant’s contract situation. He makes several great points about the matter at hand, but can not help himself when writing the following about reasons for Grant’s success last season:

A passing game led by a Hall of Fame quarterback and a very overrated corps of primarily young receivers didn’t hurt last year, either. (emphasis mine)

Overrated? Really? Leading the league in yards after the catch means you’re overrated? Wow, tough room.

It’s a shame Florio can’t help making an ass out of himself like this, because he generally does solid work when analyzing contract demands, holdouts and anything cap related. And he was, bar-none, the single greatest source of information on the Michael Vick story, long before the rest of the “Real Media” (as he likes to call them) picked up the narrative. That’s what makes it all the more disappointing when he throws out sophmorish insults like the one above, which only serve to undermine his credibility.

It should be noted that Florio’s occasional fill-in Michael David Smith, from Football Outsiders, is just as good without the stupidity and bad jokes. Florio should really hand the reigns over to Smith full time and just get out of the way.

UPDATE: Florio has commented in the post itself that he meant to write ‘underrated’ - which makes much more sense. This doesn’t change the thrust of what I’ve written above.

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• The Good and the Bad (Waiting On Ugly…)

The news that Javon Walker was found unconscious on a street in Vegas, the apparent victim of an early morning robbery, is not a surprise. Not one bit. Here’s a guy who, since he entered the league, has done everything in his power to make it abundantly clear that he cares about nothing but his money. People like to talk about how Walker gets bad advice from people around him, and that is most likely true. But ultimately, he is the one responsible for his life and the direction it has taken since his ridiculous departure from the Packers. When given a great team, a great quarterback and a coach who believed in him, he compared having to go back on the field without a new contract to a soldier having to go back to Iraq. When he was given a young quarterback with whom to grow and a team that was willing to keep him on the roster, despite multiple injury problems, he very publicly said that he would not play second fiddle to Brandon Marshall. Yes, no doubt having Darrent Williams die in his arms has effected him greatly. But did he take nothing away from that event? That perhaps having millions of dollars and making such wild displays as, oh, spraying crowds with 15 bottles of Dom Perignon in Vegas, makes you a target? It’s unbelievably stupid that Walker put himself in this position after having lived through the tragic events on New Year’s Eve three years ago.

However, and despite my very public disdain for Walker, I really don’t feel anything but sadness for him and those unfortunate enough to care about him. Here is a kid who had the world handed to him and he has proceeded to ruin everything he possibly could. As sure as he only cared about himself, he was found as one would suspect when one has no true friends (Wonder where Drew Rosenhaus was when this was going on - and isn’t it funny that we haven’t heard a peep from the little weasel?) - drunk, alone, on a street in Vegas, with a broken orbital bone and no money. I suppose I should follow Steve’s lead and reserve judgment. But sometimes, things are as they appear, plain and simple, and I believe this is one of those times.

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• Why character issues matter

An Insult To the Intelligence of People Who Follow Football.

That’s what Senator Arlen Specter calls NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s assertion that the Patriot’s taping of defensive and, now it is known, offensive signals had not “affected the outcome of any games.” And while I will forever revile the Senator from Pennsylvania for giving us the Magic Bullet theory, I could not agree with him more about this.

The following is opinion. If you don’t like it, start your own blog, or leave a comment.

The Patriots are the biggest cheaters professional sports have seen since the Black Sox scandal.

The NFL is obviously desperate to kill this story, issuing ludicrous statement after ludicrous statement, and continuing to claim that the matter is closed when it so clearly is not.

Finally, I point to one passage from the New York Times article linked above:

Mr. Specter said Mr. Walsh told him the player met with Mr. Belichick, his longtime assistant Ernie Adams and the assistant Charlie Weis, now the head coach at Notre Dame, to discuss how the team would make use of the signals. Mr. Specter said Mr. Walsh said the player told him this helped the Patriots anticipate 75 percent of the plays called by the opposing team.

The inclusion of Ernie Adams in that trifecta of deceit makes me think that I was right.

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• Why character issues matter

Sometimes, it’s hard not to get despondent.

You kiss your wife goodnight, explaining that you simply must respond to the latest salvo against your Packer-related reasoning, and hunker down at the computer, Firefox Bookmarks at the ready, and spend the better part of an evening putting together what you think is a fairly coherent, well thought out response to a fellow blogger taking exception to your hatred of futile instant grading of the NFL Draft.

You feel good about the post overall, though perhaps a bit disappointed you couldn’t quite work everything in that you really wanted to say, but overall, you think it’s an excellent post, full of passioned ideas that can better help explain your reasons for being, and I quote, an “Anti-Grade Zealot”. You head to bed, knowing that a response will follow at some point, but fairly sure you have at least opened an eye or two.

And then.

You read the response from your intended audience, and feel as though you have wasted a good part of your and his time, because it’s obvious that he is not the least bit interested in trying to learn why you’ve taken the position you’ve taken, and all the more interested in finding the “roots of my rage” (A phrase that is repeated yet again in Steve’s post - rage? Really? See, I would equate rage with, um, maybe, firebombing the NFL’s Park Avenue headquarters. That’s ‘rage’. Calling the instant grading of the draft bullshit? Not so much.)

It’s obvious we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one, (because goodness knows, if I can’t convince someone of my position in two posts, I never will…….that’s a joke…..) but I would like to point out what I consider the underlying difference between us, with the following quote from Steve’s latest missive:

Of course we can’t know whether the draft is going to be great right after the draft and of course readers know this.

So, in other words, he agrees with me, he just doesn’t mind engaging in useless exercises that only serve to waste the time of those involved.

Got it.

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• Blog Battle 2: Electric Boogaloo

Classic Ted quote:

I can’t explain what other people might say prior to the draft. I’m not saying it’s not interesting reading, but if you’re trying to do your job and you get caught up in that and Mel Kiper’s mock drafts, then all of a sudden you start drafting based on that. So we decided to stick with the football guy.

Amen.

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• A Word About the Draft

Steve over at PackerGeeks has taken umbrage with my tirade against the immediate grading of the draft and those that practice it.

As the kids say, “Oh, it is so on…”

After trying to work out some of his own childhood issues, Steve states that I never explain why I believe the giving of grades is an exercise in futility. Fair enough. Perhaps it’s because I start each post here at Cheesehead TV with the assumption that you, dear reader, are not an idiot. That every person compelled to follow a professional football team to the point where they check multiple blogs about their team is well aware of the tried and true axiom of needing to wait AT LEAST three years before one can truly begin to take stock of what transpired on draft day.

Steve then tries to engage in a game of ‘gotcha!’ by pointing out that if I don’t believe in grading a draft, how could I possibly be able to offer cogent analysis of various picks throughout the weekends’ proceedings, using my post labeling the Brohm pick a steal as his prime example of my double standard. The problem with this tactic, as I’m sure he is well aware, is that assigning value to individual selections is a much more subjective exercise (and therefore well suited to blogging) than giving out letter grades for an entire draft, with a universally agreed upon standard of what constitutes “A” through “F”. I’ll debate whether you think getting Brohm at #56 is a steal or not (mostly because it’s an argument I’d win) but to try and give a group of nine players one unifying ‘grade’, which attempts to encapsulate how the entire crop of selections have helped or hindered the fate of their respective franchise, when they haven’t so much as attended a mini-camp, is absurd. Or, to quote my original post, bullshit.

As for Steve’s noting that I never explain the “root of my rage”, well, there he has me. I think mostly it’s because the grading of drafts as they happen in real time (I mean, ESPN had a poll up immediately after the Brohm selection asking who would be the Packers’ starter by the end of the year…) is a crystallization of the Great Dumb Down that has held our country in a death grip and that shows no sign of stopping any time soon. I won’t pretend to have more lucid, laser-sharp insights into the “root of my rage” (Thanks Steve, loving that phrase!) or that I have some grand manifesto explaining the correlation of immediate draft grading and it’s effect on, say, the subprime mortgage crisis. (All I’m saying is Congress should investigate…;) I’ll just leave it as something unexplainable in my gut and beg Steve’s pardon that I can’t offer a better explanation.

I will, however, thank him ever so much for his kind words regarding my post about Day Two at Radio City. He is too kind.

UPDATE: Just for fun, have a look at this roundup of grades immediately following last years’ draft. Both teams that ended up in the NFC Championship got ‘C’s from Rick Gosselin. Both teams that ended up in the AFC Championship got ‘D’s. (Kiper gives them a C- and a C, respectively) Didn’t the Packers have key contributions from several rookies last year? Mason Crosby, James Jones and Justin Harrell all played pretty big parts. How many rookies contributed to New York’s title run? Bradshaw, Ross, Smith, Boss: the list of huge contributors to New York’s Super Bowl triumph is long. And apparently worthy only of a ‘C’.

Like I said, bullshit. Complete bullshit.

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• Why character issues matter