NFC NORRIS: GREEN BAY IS IN FOR A WORLD OF PAIN

Venom is in short supply here after dissing Detroit and blasting the Bears, so there was some thought given to scrapping this post and just running a selection of pictures culled from typing "Brett Favre" + sacked and "Brett Favre" + vikings into Google Image Search.

However, that's borderline cruel, and let's level here. Favre-carving is, like the man himself, getting old fast. It is annoying how journalists and broadcasters (here's looking at you, Sports Illustrated's Peter King) deify Green Bay's future Hall of Fame QB, but he's been around long enough to earn elder statesman status.

Plus his good-old-boy persona helps the people chronicling the game pretend football is still a bunch of guys getting together on a Sunday afternoon. Ol' No. 4 takes the media's mind of the fact that for all their claims of journalistic detachment, they are not so much covering a game as helping a bloodless, soulless corporate enterprise with the stated mission of getting kids in Sumatra to wear Jacksonville Jaguars T-shirts.

Besides, everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. In this case, there is suspicion that Favre seems to be doing the honourable thing of going down with the ship. He didn't come back since he realized youngster Aaron Rodgers wasn't ready to take over at quarterback. He came back to help the Packers' long-term future.

This grows out of a post that 10,000 Takes made last week. The Packers spent their first-round draft choice on Ohio State linebacker A.J. Hawk, whom as you might remember, became a media darling when his Buckeyes played Notre Dame in a bowl game and he was engaged to the opposing quarterback's sister, Laura Quinn.

Unless you were in a Turkish prison over the holidays, you certainly remember Laura's half-Ohio State, half-Notre Dame jersey, since ABC showed about 1,713 closeups of her in the stands during the broadcast. The general take was that she looked half-cute and half-mannish.

(Digression: Subject to what was said about the Bears' Brian Urlacher and Paris Hilton earlier, at least Laura looks like what the significant other of a linebacker on a Midwestern team should look like. Is there any doubt she can gut a fresh-caught trout? Check out those man-hands. She may not even need a knife.)

Now Laura and A.J. are married, and her brother Brady Quinn is everybody's all-America and the early favourite to be the No. 1 choice in the 2007 NFL draft. So the Packers have to finish dead last so they have no choice to but to draft the Notre Dame star as Favre's heir apparent. It can trade Rodgers before word gets out that he is no one's quarterback of the future, with the possible exception of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

Or as 10,000 Takes put it:

So, not only will the networks show Mrs. Quinn-Hawk when A.J. makes a play, they'll show her every time her brother gets flattened behind Green Bay's swiss cheese offensive line. It's up to you Minnesota. If you don't want to see Mrs. Quinn-Hawk every quarter in a uniform cut in half, with both A.J.'s number and Brady's number on it (like she did in the Fiesta Bowl), you too will be wearing a replica Chester Marcol jersey this season.

That may explain why Favre is coming back, and why he threw five interceptions in practice the other day. (As Allen Iverson once said, we're talking about practice.)

If he can throw 30, 32 interceptions when they play the games for real, it advances the chances of this coming to fruition. Some conspiracy theories do have a positive purpose.

THE GREEN BAY PACKERS.... the fightin' Packers. They fell on hard times down by the Fox River last season, stumbling to a 4-12 record, which to great delight of the Vikings Nation, included a pair of losses to the Vikes. Almost makes up for the Packers downright stealing the division title from the Vikes in '03 and '04, except our team had its own scandals to deal with.

Now, there is some baggage in the Packers-Vikings dynamic, and it can be, hold your disbelief, best cross-referenced by the scene in Mean Girls when Lacey Chabert's character completely snaps after too many years and too many putdowns as the sidekick to the Alpha Chick played by Rachel McAdams:

What's so great about Caesar? Hmmmm? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar. Brutus is just as smart as Caesar. People totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar ... we should totally just STAB Caesar!

The Packers remain everyone's favourite cuddly underdog, plus they have all that Lombardi/Titletown, USA mythology, along with the quaint appeal of being the last true hometown team in big-time North American sports, since they are the only community-owned franchise outside of the CFL.

You run into car dealers and real-estate agents, committed foot soldiers in the capitalist ethos, who say they like the Packers because they like the owners. The Packers seem to be everyone's second- or third-favourite team. Hating them is like hating apple pie.

The Vikings have one nudity-filled boat party (OK, there's been a bunch of other stuff, too) and become the butt of jokes across North America, but the Packers weren't tarred by the late Reggie White's loopy remarks about various ethnic groups, or former star tight end Mark Chmura's sexual-assault trial.

Minnesota's got all the same things going for it -- small-market team in a modest Midwestern state, with fanatically loyal fans and a decades-long wait for season tickets. A few years ago, Sports Illustrated even picked the Vikings as the most underrated hopeless sports obsession(the Red Sox, pre-2004, were picked as most overrated).

The drumbeat of Vikings fandom beats over a wide area -- across Minnesota, the plains of North and South Dakota, into the Canadian Prairies. Just Google "Vikings fan club" and links come from branches all over the U.S. and across the world, in places far geographically removed from Minnesota.

And the Vikings more often than not have been the better team. Just look the tally since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger took effect. Just don't ask about Super Bowls. Please.

Packers: 12 playoff appearances, 8 division titles, 2 conference titles

Vikings: 22 playoff appearances, 14 division titles, 3 conference titles

Naturally, what happened in January 2005, when the Vikings finally won a playoff game in Green Bay for the first time? All anyone could talk about after -- thanks to Joe Buck's prissy, lemon-sucking reaction -- was Randy Moss mock-mooning the Lambeau faithful. So what if Moss was just having a little fun? God forbid someone in pro sports should try to show people it's a game. Besides, at that point he'd been coming to Lambeau for seven years as a visiting player and had likely noticed some Packers fans were a little, ahem, high on the body-mass index. Or as I put it:

"Far be it for me to suggest that if Green Bay fans were so lucky to see Randy Moss's bare buttocks, it might inspire some of them to put down the Cheese Puffs and join a gym."

Getting back to the 2006 Packers, it's looking bad. The consensus is that they likely won't repeat last year's 4-12 debacle, but with Favre throwing passes every which way but at his receivers' numbers, anything is possible.

Green Bay's defensive personnel is almost as derelict as the Vikings' was three or four years ago. They will miss departed defensive tackle Grady Jackson terribly. Their best D-lineman, Kabeer Gbaja-Bamila, is usually good for a sack and couple of quarterback pressures each game, but on running plays, the Packers might as well put a Yield sign in his place.

Yes, they have a decent pair of corners in Al Harris and ex-Raider Charles Woodson, which means teams will actually have to dink and dunk their way down the field instead of burning the Packers for 60-yard touchdowns.

As for the Pack's so-called offence. Well, it's dawning on people know that maybe Favre is great, after all, since last season Green Bay wasn't much more than his cannon arm and his wits. The offensive line struggled mightily last year. Their one dependable wideout, Javon Walker, was traded to Denver, leaving the fragile Robert Ferguson and the declining Donald Driver. Running back Ahman Green looks like he's taken too many hits.

New coach Mike McCarthy is supposed to correct the offensive problems. Where did he coach last year? With the 49ers, who had the league's last-ranked passing attack. (Yes, even worse than Chicago's.)

Again, though, with two games against the Lions the Packers probably should be able to be a 6-10 team. However, don't act surprised at all if its Week 15 game against the Lions shapes up as the Brady Bowl.

Previous victims: Detroit Lions, Chicago Bears.

Related: Blog Blast Past No. 2: Damn Vikings (July 17)

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.