The Sunday Evening Post: Week 8

Full disclosure: I'm a Green Bay Packers fan, and one who fell in love with the team at the height of Favre's having-fun-being-the-best-quarterback-in-the-NFL reign. I cannot tell you how many times I read something about how Favre got to aerate the often-woeful secondaries of the NFC Central and NFC North in those years, but I can tell you that seeing him do it as many times as he did for the Packers never lost its appeal. 

When Favre is on -- and, even when his prodigious ability to throw the deep ball metastasized to the inability to avoid throwing 20 interceptions a season, he still had games in which he was on as a Packer -- it is a joy to watch. At his best, at his luckiest, Brett Favre is a guy who can play football like kids do in backyards, and get away with it because his arm allows him to rifle footballs into tiny windows and past the tightest of coverages.

That's what Favre did today, sort of, in a 38-26 win that cemented his Minnesota Vikings as the unquestioned lords of the NFC North.

The Packers' secondary is old and slowed, and their pass rush struggled to create pressure against a strong Vikings line. So Favre got the time to scramble and to fire away, and he did, to the tune of 244 yards and four scores through the air.

But, as it was when Favre was helming Super Bowl teams in Green Bay, he will earn the headlines for flashy stats while the rest of his team excels quietly.

For this week, certainly, he eclipsed Adrian Peterson, only the best running back in the NFL. Peterson had 97 yards and a touchdown on an unspectacular day, and remains the Vikings' best offensive weapon. Percy Harvin may challenge Peterson as a big-play threat, though: He had 84 receiving yards and a TD, and added 175 yards on kick returns, putting the Vikings in great field position time and again.

And Favre plays offense, eternally sexier than defense. That was so in 1996 when Reggie White was a terror for those Packers, and it is so in 2009 when Jared Allen does the same. (He's had 7.5 sacks in two games against the Packers this year, but try getting ESPN to mention that tonight.) The Vikings stop the run (95.8 yards allowed per game) and force turnovers in bunches (17 in eight games), which makes up for a below-average pass defense.

But it is Favre whose quest for a Super Bowl will be rhapsodized, because it is his final one. Now that his "revenge" has been taken against the Packers, that will be also the storyline of this Vikings season.

In snagging Favre after his season in purgatory with the Jets, the Vikings have created a team that is much like the ones Favre played for in Green Bay: Offensively explosive and defensively impressive, save for a sometimes shaky secondary.

Vikings fans must now hope the story ends like it did when Favre was 25, almost literally a kid out there, and not 40, when his reputation runs wild as he once did.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.