We heard plenty from Brett Favre during Sunday night’s preseason game between the Vikings and the 49ers. Peter King of SI.com got a few words after the game from coach Brad Childress, and they appear in King’s latest edition of Monday Morning Quarterback.
Criticized for the perception that he begged Brett to play again and the subject of a much-discussed report that Favre believes Childress “has no clue” about offense, Childress says he had one motivation: to win.
“There are no sacrosanct rules in this business,” Childress told King. “You do what you have to do to win, and I’ve got no problem with that. You can’t get a hit if you don’t swing the bat.’'
As to that much-publicized Hattiesburg hunt, with Childress sending three players to Mississippi to track, tag, and bag, the elusive albino lion, King thinks that Favre was going to show up on his own in due course, but that Ryan Longwell, Steve Hutchinson, and Jared Allen were allowed to miss meetings and practice with the goal of accelerating the process.
“The hardest thing we had to do, the hardest thing by far, was getting him down that long driveway in Hattiesburg,’' Childress said. “Once we got him to go down that long driveway, we had him. He was in.’'
That’s the most palatable explanation, far better than the notion that it was staged for dramatic effect or that Favre never would have mustered on his own the desire to return, and that he needed to be cajoled into playing by the simultaneous application of three sets of lips to his rear end.
As we said three weeks ago when Favre launched his power play aimed at getting more money and/or buying more time, he likely believed he could waltz into the locker room on the afternoon of September 9, trade his ratty old hat for a helmet and his flip-flops for cleats and go out and play. More realistically, we thought he’d show up on Friday, September 3, six days before the regular-season opener. And the Vikings would have welcomed him with open arms if he’d waited that long.
But even if Childress has “no clue” about offense, he knows a thing or two about what makes Favre tick, and Childress played it perfectly.