Favre vs. Ripken? Gimme a break

Last month, I approvingly quoted a comment made by Bill Simmons during the World Series: "And [LaRussa]'s firmly entrenched in that Brett Favre Zone, where the announcers are so busy paying homage to him for three hours, they don't even notice when he screws up." Seems like a good lead for a day in which sports reporters are falling over each other trying to out-superlative each other for Favre's 200th consecutive game. These guys are completely in love with Green Bay's QB and seek every opportunity possible to pay homage to him. For example, on Tuesday morning espn.com gushed that Favre's heroics "put the Packers back atop the NFC North." Well, actually, they're tied with the Vikings for first. I suppose we can argue semantics all we want, but that strikes me as a little misleading.

Fine, the man is a great quarterback. But this business of comparing his streak to Cal Ripken's is absolutely ludicrous. Obviously, the argument here is that football is a violent game and so it's harder to play as many games. Well, duh, that's why they play ten times as many baseball games as football games. 200 football games is 12.5 years. 2,632 baseball games is 16.25 years. The time given to recover between games is commensurate to the difficulty of recovery. How many times has Favre suffered an injury during a game and then taken advantage of the 7 days that he gets to recover from it? Ripken never had that luxury. If he would have gotten injured (and yes, folks, baseball players do get injured, believe it or not), he would have had less than 24 hours to recover.

It boggles my mind that people are so quick to minimize Ripken's accomplishment. Aaron Schatz, one of Snap Judgment's Morons in Residence, actually argues that "the reason Favre's streak is more impressive than Ripken's streak is that Ripken was mediocre by the end of his streak." In the first place, Aaron, this is a complete non-sequiter. But for the sake of argument, allow me to also point out that Ripken's streak is 4 years longer than Favre's. I'm pretty sure that Favre will be looking pretty darned mediocre in 4 years. And I'm talking about as a broadcaster.

Another ridiculously obvious thing that needs to be pointed out here is that Favre doesn't even have the NFL record for consecutive games played. And it's not even close! The record is held by Jim Marshall of the Vikings, who played in 282 consecutive games from 1960 to 1979. Back when they were playing 14 games a year. Marshall's position? Defensive end. I haven't played too many football games at defensive end, but I get the impression that there's a fair amount of contact down there.

And finally, there's that pesky, un-PC Peyton Manning. Peyton has started every game of his career and has a streak of 107 consecutive games. Anything could happen of course, but it seems like he has a pretty good chance of getting to 200. Will people be comparing him to Ripken then? Don't hold your breath.