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Brett Favre has announced his retirement from the Green Bay Packers, and that’s a retirement announcement that nobody really wanted to hear, because we watched him have one of his best years last year. He was healthy, his arm was still strong, his legs were strong, he didn’t have bad knees, bad shoulders, and he was playing on a really good football team. But he said in his press conference that he was just tired. I understand that. When I retired from football I was 38 years old – one month before I turned 39 – after playing for 18 years. I had a bum shoulder, torn cruciate, and was recovered from a broken leg, but more than that, I was just tired. It was time to go. So I understand that.

People have talked about Brett Favre and how he played the game, his zest for life, how he played the game wide open, and all of that is true. But they missed maybe the most important part of Brett Favre. It’s not whether he was the best quarterback that ever lived, or had the strongest arm, or whether he was the one who played with the most passion. This is a young man that really overcame some demons and changed his life. Many times we think that we talk about change, but we don’t do anything about it. We make the same mistakes over and over again, and blame them on everybody else. But Brett came to the National Football League as the number one draft choice of the Atlanta Falcons. He came here and barely spent a sober day, if you listen to what Brett says about his life as a rookie. He missed practices, he was late to this, he was late to that. He drank himself out of Atlanta, Georgia, according to Brett Favre. He had a problem. And he was traded to the Green Bay Packers. You never trade a quarterback of this talent to another team. They are too hard to find, and he may arguably have the greatest talent of any quarterback that ever played. But they traded him. It wasn’t because they were dumb football people, but they thought this guy was so demon-ridden that he could not make the changes that he would need to make to be the accomplished quarterback that he was. But to his credit, he did. At a young age, he changed who Brett Favre was. And I think that is the greatest achievement he made, because without doing that his life would have been a shambles, no matter what his football career would have been. But he changed his life and he became a great person, a great friend, a great father, a great husband, a great son…. Just everything you would like to have in a person regardless of his athletic appeal. And that is the thing that I admire about Brett Favre’s career more than anything else. Oh, he played with great passion, wide open reckless abandon, strong arm and would fling an under-handed side arm, over-handed…whatever it took to help his team win. And he sure gave us a lot of memories.

But with Brett’s retirement, we are back into the endless topic of who is the best quarterback that ever lived. Well, I read an interesting article in the New York Times just this weekend by Dave Anderson, who is in his mid- to late 60’s. He’s been around the NFL forever. I knew him when I was playing, and he wrote a great article called “The Best Quarterbacks: A Juicy But Fruitless Topic.” He said “to try to rate the best quarterbacks from, say, No. 1 to even No. 5 or No. 10 is silly. Too many different eras, different teams, different coaches, different teammates, different opponents, different schedules, even different rules. The best quarterbacks are not only apples and oranges, some are peaches and pears.”

And he went through who he thought were in the top 16. He had all the regular names – Joe Montana, Johnny Unitas, Otto Graham – but he went on and made 16 selections. Thankfully and luckily, he put me in the top 16. But that’s not the point of the story.

After he picked the 16, he said you can say these 16 qualify for the best quarterback…but then he added that you can add a another couple of guys if you wish. He says he didn’t add Y.A. Tittle, or Dan Fouts or Bobby Layne or Norm Van Brocklin, but you could add them also. The point is well taken because there is no way to say that one person was the greatest quarterback of all time.

But in Brett Favre’s case, it’s really easy to say that here is a man that commands our respect for the changes that he made in his life that should inspire you and I, and people of all ages, that we don’t have to be like we are. We can be significantly better if we make up our minds to make the changes that we need to make.