Brett Favre and the stats may fall

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This is not really about Brett Favre and only Brett Favre, not that Brett has not created a lot of news lately with the Viking rumors and Fran Tarkenton chiming in about Brett being the enemy as a former Packer, no, this is about records in the NFL and how the longer seasons are destroying records from a different era.

Football is loaded with stats and some stats come up all the time like rushing records or touchdown records, but in this day and age the records are falling simply from the longer seasons.

Dan Marino’s impressive single-season passing-yardage mark of 5,084 is poised to drop quickly, much like Joe Namath’s mark of 4,007 yards did shortly after the NFL went from 14 games to 16 in 1978. Now Namath’s record sits at 72nd overall, buried under an avalanche of passing numbers that have spun north like the wheels of a slot machine.

“In my mind, the numbers don’t really define the player as much as how you remember him in his era,” said Hall of Famer Dan Fouts, who was the first to break Namath’s mark. “Jim Brown was great. Johnny Unitas was great. And they’d be just as great today. For me, having broken records and then having them subsequently broken by other players, once you’re in the Hall of Fame, it doesn’t matter. I don’t even know where I stand anymore in some things because it doesn’t matter to me.”

source

Brett owns a great number of records just because he played so long. He still had to be great and consistent and Brett would still be considered great and consistent in any era of football.

Brett Favre in any era would have been great!

Actually, to me it is a sadder case in baseball where several records fell due to steroid usage and not something like season lengths. Roger Maris broke the home run record and had and * put beside his record, because Babe Ruth did it in a shorter season. How about two * beside the steroid home run records?

So far football has decided to let the records fall and this has seemed to work out just fine.

Photo source Newscom

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