1.) He's one of the very best to ever play the position. People who argue otherwise simply don't know the game very well or have a bias that gets in the way of their being rational.
2.) Weighing retirement does not equal being an attention whore. People in New England once liked hearing actual press conferences from players and coaches. Now that BB and his "ministry of information" sort of approach has taken root here, suddenly that's a vice.
3.) He hasn't "sucked for years". He may have been the #2 quarterback in the NFL last season behind only Brady.
1) He's #1 in career interceptions. That alone eliminates him from consideration for being one of the very best to ever play. He was a very good, if largely overrated, quarterback for a long time.
2) I agree, in general, but players weigh retirement all the time. Most players, however, understand that it's to everyone's benefit to make the decision privately, and not to give daily updates to the media. He's not an attention whore
because he's considering retirement; he's an attention whore because, for at least four consecutive seasons, he's turned his "will I or won't I" saga into an ongoing soap opera, to the point that even the Packers finally got fed up with it last year.
3) Roethlisberger and Peyton Manning were both pretty objectively better than Favre last year, as well, but your general point does stand. Favre was very good last year, which was pretty unexpected after his 2005 and 2006 seasons. It has been well-documented that this improvement was largely due to McCarthy's insistence that he become a student of the game, watch a lot of film, and work within the offense. This year, he pretty much sucked again.
Now might not be a bad time to mention that, since 2005, Favre has 88 TDs and 84 INTs. How's that for stellar... That's an average of +1 TD/INT ratio per season. That's including last year, when you claim that he was perhaps the second best QB out there. Even including that season, he has averaged exactly one more TD than INT per season over the past four years. Have I phrased this in enough different ways? Does it make sense to you yet?
From 1994-2004, Favre was a consistently Pro Bowl-caliber QB. Considering that he was able to do that for ten years, I'd even say that he belongs in the hall of fame. To say that he should be considered one of the best ever, though, is pretty ridiculous. Objectively, I just don't see how someone can claim that he was one of the top 10 QBs to play in the NFL.
