Looking back at your own risk
By JIM LITKE
AP Sports Columnist
September 8, 2003
Smart people in the NFL should know better than to ask, ``What have you done for me yesterday?''
More than any other game, fortunes rise and fall in pro football at an increasingly dizzy pace. A franchise reminds fans of that fact at its own risk.
That was the downside to scheduling a celebration at halftime, the way the Packers did Sunday in Green Bay. Whatever goodwill it buys a team to commemorate a glorious tradition or rededicate a shrine like Lambeau Field -- and Green Bay did both -- evaporates faster than sweat when there's little worth celebrating by game's end.
The Packers and their fans had good reason to expect better. They were 8-0 at home during the regular season last year and 21-3 there during coach Mike Sherman's tenure. But if anybody needed reminding of how fast fate switches sides in today's NFL, there was the tableau of Packers quarterback Brett Favre in the closing seconds of the first half, just after throwing the third of four interceptions, squeezing his own helmet in frustration with both hands.
Whether it was because of a bad read by Favre, or a wrong turn by Green Bay receiver Donald Driver at the end of his route, the quarterback many still consider the best in the game threw a spiral to wide-open Minnesota cornerback Brian Williams like he was the intended target all along.
Favre is still dangerous enough to win games by himself. That's why all the coy talk about retiring sounds foolish. But he isn't as good as he was just a few short years ago -- good enough to make a good team great -- and the difference between perception and reality turns out to be a costly one.
Favre never ducks criticism when it's deserved and he called the loss ``as ugly as it gets.''
Not long after, he added, ``As upset as I am and as this team is, we can do like we did in the first half or we can play the rest of the season like we did in the second half.''
In New York, another quarterback casting envious glances at his past was treated to an equally rude awakening.
Kurt Warner was coming off a season when he saw just enough action to get tagged with an 0-6 record and the blame for the splintering of a Rams team that once had the word ``dynasty'' pasted all over it. Since breaking his right pinkie in a loss to Dallas last September, everything from his faith to the zip left in his throwing arm has been questioned. When his wife, Brenda, heard that discussion being aired on a talk-radio show last fall in St. Louis, she called the station to defend her man. Naturally, it only made matters worse.
Warner's performance -- ``This is the best my arm has felt in years,'' he announced on the eve of his sixth season -- was supposed to still the debate. Instead, the Giants cranked up the volume and ripped off the knob by sacking Warner six times and causing him to cough up the same number of fumbles in a 23-13 New York win.
Adding injury to insult, Warner suffered a concussion and was scheduled to be hospitalized overnight. St. Louis coach Mike Martz speculated the decisive blow came in the first quarter, when Warner fumbled in his own end zone, handing the Giants a touchdown.
``He didn't seem the same after that,'' Martz said. ``A lot of times he didn't seem to understand the plays we were calling from the sidelines.''
In the case of running back Emmitt Smith, that might not have made a difference. He picked up just four yards in his first five carries after moving from Dallas to Arizona, and the rest of his day running behind the Cardinals offensive line didn't go much better.
Smith totaled 64 yards on 13 carries. That pushed his career rushing record to 17,226 yards, but did precious little to soothe his bruised ego after a 42-24 beating by the Lions.
Coaches weren't immune from those kinds of hits, either.
New England's Bill Belichick unloaded quarterback Drew Bledsoe 18 months ago and released four-time Pro Bowl safety Lawyer Milloy just five days earlier, convinced that their best days were behind them. Both landed in Buffalo and they combined Sunday to stick it to Belichick and the Patriots 31-0.
When asked about a sideline discussion the two shared once the outcome was no longer in doubt, Bledsoe explained there are times when revisiting the not-so-distant past is irresistible.
``We were talking about,'' he said with a wink, ``what you probably think we were talking about.''
Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org
