Busy few weeks, but it’s time to watch some Monday Night Football, or at least have it on in the background while I’m working on the next issue of the magazine. It’s Green Bay vs Minnesota, and while I imagine new quarterback Aaron Rodgers just might do well, I can’t help but wonder how it’s possible that Brett Favre made his season debut yesterday as the quarterback for another team. I know, I know, Favre was being ridiculously wishy-washy about whether he was going to retire, just as he has been during each of the past few offseasons. But as we all saw yesterday, he’s still a long way from being washed up.
In fact, best I can tell, the Packers decision to dump him had nothing to do with the fact that he’s getting older or any questions about his ability to continue playing well. Instead, this was all about the fact that they were simply sick of his indecisiveness. They’ll still have a chance to be a good team this year with the new guy, but they don’t strike me as a Super Bowl contender – and they would have been a contender for sure if they’d kept Favre. Sure, Favre had actually gone so far this time as to officially retire for a few months in the offseason and then un-retire after the new guy had been told he was going be the guy, but that’s simple enough to deal with: “Dear Aaron Rodgers, our apologies but Brett Favre is coming back after all, and we can win the Super Bowl with him but we can’t win it with you, so we’re going to pay you millions of dollars to hold a clipboard for one more year.” It’s really just that simple. If you want to succeed, then it has to be. Sure, you try to take care of your people, but Rodgers would have gotten paid the same money this year whether he touched a football or not.
As a business owner I’ve always wanted to strike up friendships with the people who are working for me, always hoped to build the staff as one big happy family, and I’m probably too sentimental in that way sometimes. And basic human instinct dictates that you don’t like having people around that you like having around you. But even I know that you don’t fire an employee with Brett Favre’s talent and productivity just because you find him annoying.
Meanwhile, Favre did a nice job yesterday of beating my Dolphins, although just barely. The Jets weren’t a very good team when Chad Pennington was their quarterback, and while they’re clearly better not that they’ve replaced him with Favre, they’re still not a very good team – and the quarterback position was far from their biggest liability to begin with. But in this case, both the coach and general manager of the Jets are probably one more losing season away from both being fired as it is, and while they won’t win a Super Bowl this year even with Favre, they’ll be a modest contender and that’ll probably save their jobs for another year or two. It seems that the Jets ownership is making a basic business mistake of a different sort: never allow employees whose jobs are in trouble to start making business decisions that are geared toward keeping their jobs intact. Again, it’s just human nature, but as a boss you’ve got to step in and prevent that from happening.
Not that I ever bought into Chad Pennington as some kind of savior when the Dolphins signed him, as some in the local media did. The fact that the Jets dumped him for someone better and he immediately became the Dolphins starting quarterback simply tells you how bad the Dolphins are right now. If you fired an employee for being consistently mediocre, and another company immediately hired him and put him in charge, you’d have to assume that no one in their current ranks was even able to achieve mediocrity. But on the other hand, the Dolphins do have a pair of young quarterbacks, one of whom has shown a lot of potential, and they know their future lies with one of those two and not with Chad Pennington. He’s simply their best option right now for bringing some mediocre stability (“mediocre” being a big upgrade for a team that only one won game all last year) while the rest of the team figures out what it’s doing, and allowing the two young guys to keep their noses clean in the meantime.
The funny thing is, the Dolphins are the only team I’ve mentioned so far that aren’t trying to win anything this year. The team’s new management knows that the franchise and the roster were made into a mess by the last three or four incompetents who ran the team (I’ve honestly lost count), and they know that they have no chance of truly contending this year, so they’re using it as one big long dress rehearsal to see who’s going to be with them for the long term and what’s going to work down the road. The reason they’re comfortable doing so is because they know for certain that they’re not getting fired any time soon, and so they don’t have to put on a show and they know they can afford to make decisions that are best for the long term even if those decisions to end up making this year’s mediocre-at-best season look a little worse. And that’s fine with me. After all, the last guy running the Dolphins was trying to win every game, and he lost pretty much all of his games anyway. If the Dolphins happen to win a couple games this year by accident while trying to build toward the future, then that’s still more games than they won last year.
Bottom line is that you can learn an awful lot about how things work (or how they should and shouldn’t work) just by watching others. And while we tend to think of football as a game, the truth is that it’s big business – and the people making the business decisions are, out of public relations necessity, forced to make nearly all of their decisions in broad daylight for public scrutiny. It’s fairly easy for us to sit back and think we could do a better job, and most of us probably couldn’t, but it does give us the opportunity to maybe learn a few thing about business if we watch for the right things.
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