Favre-a-lish-ish-ness

For almost 2 weeks now Brett Favre has wanted back into the NFL and the Green Bay Packers did everything including offer him $25 million to stay home and be a mascot for the franchise. The Packers have been told by the NFL commissioner that they must take back their first ballot, without a doubt Hall of Famer who finished second in the MVP voting last year to Tom Brady. The Packers send out this press release as a official statement on the situation:

STATEMENT BY PACKERS PRESIDENT/CEO MARK MURPHY

Sixteen years after Brett Favre came to the Packers, he is returning for a seventeenth season. He has had a great career with our organization and although we built this year around the assumption that Brett meant what he said about retiring, Brett is coming back. We will welcome him back and turn this situation to our advantage.

Frankly, Brett’s change of mind put us in a very difficult spot. We now will revise many actions and assumptions about our long-term future, all predicated on Brett’s decision last March to retire. As a result of his decision, we invested considerably in a new and different future without Brett and we were obviously moving in that direction. That’s why this wasn’t easy. Having crossed the Rubicon once when Brett decided to retire, it’s very difficult to reorient our plans and cross it again in the opposite direction – but we’ll put this to our advantage.

Brett will be in camp tomorrow. Although there has been uncertainty regarding Brett’s return, Ted Thompson and Coach McCarthy had previously discussed this and have had a plan in place. Coach McCarthy will talk to the team and the quarterbacks about the plan moving forward, and after he has done that we will share it publicly.

No matter what, I look forward to another successful season for the Packers and our fans. This has been a tough situation, but the Packers will make the most of it.

Wow ... the team can't even fake excitement about Favre's return. The Packers hired former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer to head up their PR effort as they try to wade their way through the aftermath of everyone's favorite QB returning from retirement. Fleischer finger prints are all over this statement allowing the team to express their anger and fake the contentment with the situation.

The "Crossing the Rubicon"comment is oddly included and sending many people scrambling for Wikipedia for answers.

"Crossing the Rubicon" is a popular idiom meaning to go past a point of no return and refers to Julius Caesar crossing the river in 49 BC deliberately as an act of war. Rubicon is a 29 km long river in northern Italy. The river flows from the Apennine Mountains to the Adriatic Sea through the southern Emilia-Romagna region between the towns of Rimini and Cesena. According to historian Suetonius ...When crossing the river Caesar uttered the famous phrase "the die is cast".

So the Packers are equating the return of one of the best quarterbacks in all of football to a act of war 1,959 year ago. Man ... they really don't like the guy.