Brett Favre-Joe Namath Lore? The transcript written from Brett Favre?s New York Jets Introductory Press Conference has a small blip in it. The New York Jets Website here has Favre saying: ?There?s no guarantees, there?s never been any guarantees for me. The game of football is just that and anything can happen?. A tiny blip, a little error, almost too hard to catch. Nonetheless, a mistake. What Brett Favre actually said was, and listen closely now, ?There?s no guarantees, there?s never been any guarantees from me. The game of football is just that - a game of football - and anything can happen?. Again: ??No guarantees, there?s never been any guarantees from me.? This just slightly piques the interest because the implication is clear to any rational (!) Jets Fan. Whether or not Brett Favre is versed in Jets Lore, even NFL Lore, I don?t know, but it is hard to pass up life?s small ironies, especially ones from Brett Favre?s inaugural address as a New York Jet, a speech rife with reference to a self-manufactured distinction between himself, his country-boy manner and ?commercials and Broadway, all those things? that seem to reference the Jets Most Famous Player, the braggadocio QB Joe Namath. See, there?s a tangible difference between saying on the one hand, ?there?s never been any guarantees for me? and on the other, ?there?s never been any guarantees from me?. The usage of ?for? and ?from? impart two completely different meanings, and the true meaning is not at all fungible. For the NFL Lore novice, which I doubt Brett Favre is, having played for such a Lore-Rich Franchise for 16 years, The Green Bay Packers, ?Broadway? Joe was the trailblazing, hotshot, hipster QB that gunned the Jets and the AFL to their first Championship versus the NFL in what was the ?Championship Game? and now is the ?Super Bowl?. This was no ordinary win because it proved that the upstart underdog AFL could stand toe to toe with the NFL?s elite, take the hits, and then, amazingly, first take over the game, dominate, and finally deliver a knockout. It was unique because of the bravado displayed by Namath three days before the game, when in response to a heckler at a press conference claiming that the Colts would kick the Jets you-know-whats, Namath?s visceral response came out as, ?We?re goning to win the game. I guarantee it.? Now, this knowledge is canon for any football fan with a brain. Namath guaranteed victory and then came through. Greatest upset in Superbowl history. It legitimized the AFL; forced the merger into what is now the modern NFL. Canon. But a price paid in what some say was blood. Gotham, brash, bravado - Brett Favre has drawn the line in the sand. And the distinction was made yet again today, in Favre?s first Post-Practice comments. Have a listen: ?I?d love to win the Super Bowl?and as I said yesterday and the day before: my intentions are to help this team win. I can?t make any guarantees. I?m not going to make any guarantees. Hopefully all I can say is I?ll do my best; hopefully that?s enough.? Brett?s coming through loud and clear. He isn?t a savior. He isn?t a 22 year old iconoclast with a fu-manchu. Brett is emphatically NOT Joe Namath. He?s ?here for one reason. Not to do commercials and Broadway, all those things. I?m here to help the Jets win. So the sooner I can get to that, the better.? Brett Favre has striking physical and gameplay similarities to Namath: The rocket arm, the gunslinger mentality, the interceptions. But Brett Favre is the iconoclast Anti-Namath, in the House That Namath Built. That Cursed House. In a town where even when you win, you don?t always win. Especially if your uniforms are green. Brett is no savior, according to himself. No sir indeed. By whatever force he has been blown onto Gotham?s Tabloids, he is like a leaf twirling in an eddy in the wind. I am left wondering, as so many are left wondering, is Brett Favre just a small town southern-boy mindin? his own, or is he a real Turn of Fortune for a luck-less franchise? Is Brett Favre for real, or is this some sort of twisted joke engineered by forces we cannot grasp? I?ll tell you what, even with his brutal honesty, Brett Favre?s saying all the right things. And I?ll tell you what?s more, there?s an ear dedicated to listening, a hand dedicated to writing, and a reckoning to be made when it?s all said and done. from my newish blog paper airplanes http://throwingpaperairplanes.com
Really. And if you know the Jets lore, you know that Namath had no intention of going public with that prediction, but was goaded into it by the media (and the Colts players) constantly saying to him that the Colts were going to destroy the Jets. There is no doubt that the Jets were confident that they could beat the Colts, and they were right - they were actually the better team. What does that have to do with the upcoming Jets season?
the jets didn't know before hand they were the better team, and during the game the colts didn't get many breaks. the point is namath actually said it. that's why it is jets lore, nfl lore. why does it rarely ever happen that someone will "guarantee" victory? bc the outcome of the game is NOT known beforehand. the point is also that Favre has actually said what he has said. he meant saying that he's not here for Broadway. That wasn't the case with namath. it is an interesting juxtaposition.
You are completely wrong. The Jets in general, and Namath in particular, were 100% convinced that they were the better team beforehand. Here are some quotes from Namath's 1969 book "I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow ... 'Cause I Get Better Looking Every Day": -- "I was down in the Imperial Room of the Galt Ocean Mile attending a team meeting and getting my first look at the Baltimore movies. Like always, I only watched their defensive team, the guys I'd be facing, and, I'll tell you, I enjoyed that show as much as a good Lee Marvin movie ... Some people were saying that the Jets'd be scared of the Colt defense. Scared, hell - the only thing that scared me was that they might change their defense ... The more I saw of the Baltimore movies, the better I felt." -- "I'd been telling people all year that the American Football League had caught up to the National Football League and people kept telling me I was wrong. Well, I was wrong. We'd already passed them in a lot of things ... We had three or four guys on our club who'd spent some time with the Colts before they moved up in class." -- "I practiced damn hard, and I watched Baltimore movies in my room, as well as at our team meetings. I loved what the projector showed me; the one-eyed monster tells no lies. I guess my teammates felt the same way. 'Damn, Joe, we better stop watching these movies,' Pete Lammons said to me, after one meeting, 'or we're gonna get overconfident.' I cracked up laughing. Then I realized Pete was right; I wondered which one of us was going to call up the Colts and tell them they didn't have a chance." -- " 'We're going to win Sunday,' I told the people at the Touchdown Club dinner. 'I'll guarantee you.' I was just telling those people the truth. I know I'm not allowed to bet on football games, but, what the hell, all those people were nice enough to give me an award. I figured I'd be nice enough to give them a good tip. They should have mortgaged their houses and put everything on the Jets. Hell, they could have bought their own llama rugs and their own fur coats. Instead some of them thought Namath's a real joker. I don't joke about football. I don't joke about the game." -- "I honestly felt that we had a better team. Judging from the movies, as I said before, I wasn't too impressed by the Baltimore defense. Come to think of it, judging from a couple of their games I saw on television, I wasn't too impressed with their offense, either. And I felt we had a stronger team physically ... I felt Maynard, Sauer and Lammons, as a group, were better receivers than Baltimore's Jimmy Orr, Willie Richardson and John Mackey; I felt Snell and Boozer were better runners than Baltimore's Tom Matte and Jerry Hill. I didn't see any way they were better than us. I study football, and I understand it - well, I understand some of it - and when I say we're a better football team, you can go to sleep on that." As far as people not guaranteeing victory - are you kidding? It's done all the time, which is why most people now consider it a joke when someone actually does it. What is true is that no one other than Namath would have had the balls to do it in January 1969 before that game, which is why he became a legend for doing it. It would have been pointless and stupid for Favre to say anything like that in his first press conference, which is why raising it as if it is something important is a waste of time.
I really dislike how you continually try to confuse people with facts thus taking the ambiguity and subjectivity out of mindless debates.
Personally I think Namath was looking for an opportunity to make the prediction. It was his way of telling his team mates that they belonged on the same field as the Colts. I like the post because I do think Favre and Namath are both alot alike. Both are small town guys and both are gun slingers with great skills. The difference of course is Namath completely embraced NYC and he was at the end of the season and the leader of the team and knew what he was and what his team was. Favre is at the begining with this team and he is physically and mentally exhausted at the moment. Once Favre gets into football shape and if he and the team start having success together and build this team into something special at the end, I suspect we will see a different Favre if not with an outright guarantee, at least with some great body language that indicates he and the team are ready to take the next step.
Sorry, WB, but I disagree completely. As the quotes I gave before showed, that's not what Namath said at the time, or immediately afterwards, and plenty of the Jet veterans weren't happy about it. Besides Lammons, other Jets from that time have also said that they were confident going in, as Art Shamsky noted in his book The Magnificent Seasons: Winston Hill - "I believed we were good. I didn't think there was anyone I couldn't play against and block. I thought if we gave Namath time he would pick the Colts apart." Larry Grantham - "A lot of us weren't very happy about Joe's pregame prediction of a win, but Joe was Joe. We were pretty confident ourselves. After seeing a lot of film you could really diagnose the Colts team." Gerry Philbin - "I wasn't shocked [about the prediction]. In watching films of the Colts we saw they could be beaten. They played an offense that was so detectible. Our defense was more advanced than a lot of NFL teams." Randy Rasmussen - "The one thing that really stood out when we were watching film of the Colts, we realized the way they played they didn't look as difficult to us as maybe other people thought. We matched up better against them than against the Raiders. We were getting two stories. One from the outside telling us that we were going to get killed and the other from ourselves saying we thought we could beat them easier than the Raiders." Walt Michaels - "We looked at the Colts on film and I figured we played at least three teams in our league who were similar to what they were doing. We knew they were overconfident. They looked predictable on offense. I had tremendous confidence in our defense and their ability to understand what I was trying to get across to them." I think the evidence is pretty clear that the team was very confident going into the game, based on everything they had seen on film of the Colts beforehand.
There's a difference between "feeling and thinking" that you have the better team -- even saying so, like if Namath said, "I feel we are a better team," and "predicting and guaranteeing" the team will win, which is kind of like a prophecy, foreknowledge. There is no way for Namath to have known that even if the Jets were the better team, which I am not convinced of, they would have actually won. "Any Given Sunday" means that even a team that is better than an another, can lose. Even if the Colts weren't the better team, lets say they were equal. Look at The Colts performance that day. It isn't as if they got blown out of the water. What doomed the Colts were turnovers, the Jets Ball-control strategy, and TOP. They were a superior team in some areas. http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/history/boxscore/sbiii
I've given quotes from a half-dozen players and coaches showing that they were very confident going into the game and absolutely believed they were the better team, something you disputed. I will also go with their view (and the evidence of the game), rather than yours, that they were in fact the better team. Game statistics when a team is ahead 16-0 until late in the 4th quarter are of course meaningless; for example, Namath did not throw a single pass in the 4th quarter. Dismissing the turnovers is also ridiculous. It isn't a coincidence that the weakest part of the Jets defense (the secondary) had a great game - that's what film study helps you do. The fact that on any given Sunday the better team doesn't always win is obvious, and completely besides the point. You keep trying to put some deep meaning into the fact that Favre said you can't guarantee anything in a press conference in August, when there isn't. Namath didn't predict in August 1968 that the Jets would get into the Super Bowl, as that would have just been stupid. He predicted the Super Bowl win because he was goaded into it by some fans and by the media, who were mostly NFL loyalists who despised the AFL, and because he knew that the Jets were the better team in that game based on hours of film he and the rest of the team had been looking at in the previous two weeks. There is absolutely no parallel with Favre's situation right now, and looking for one is pointless.
why don't you pay attention to the facts i posted rather than rely on the perceptions of players watching film who are subject to cognitive biases. The fact is that the Colts perforated the Jets defense, driving inside Jets territory numerous times, but couldn't punch it in. Not necessarily because the Jets were so great on defense. and there is no parallel drawn. it is looking at the 2 QBs, their styles of play, lifestyle, etc. looking at their words, comparing them. looking at Favre's words in light of the Guarantee, the only SB win in team history, and the curse that has hovered over since. The point is that this player - through his words - is the complete opposite of Namath. As Biggs said: Namath came in and embraced it all of it. He started a low-life bar, Bachelors III that forced a showdown with Rozelle. Favre is the opposite. He is tentative. He wants no part of Broadway, commercials (10,000 to shave off the fumanchu), any of that high life. Do you get it? Or do you just think that the Jets were such a better team and it was inevitable that they would have won? :up:
You're such a waste of time, dumbass. Get your hearing checked fool. He clearly says "there's no guarantees FROM me" Go listen to it again. I caught it live and you could'nt catch it after hearing it again and again? Besides, "There's no guarantee's from me" is only wrong in the sense of grammer. If you wanted to waste so much time, you probably should have caught the most obvious one. There ARE no guarantees from me.
wow. just wow. i know he says "from me". that is my whole point. it was misquoted by the transcriber that wrote the transcript. I'm not talking about grammar at all. unbelieveable. What's with it with this place?
What are you talking about? If you truly don't understand that game statistics when one team is spending the half running out the clock are meaningless I can't help you. The Colts used up time marching slowly down the field, and then were terrible in the red zone over and over. That's not a coincidence - that's a defense that's better than the offense. I watched that game, and the Jets dominated - anyone who saw it would say the same thing. In fact, this is what you originally wrote about the Jets that day - that they showed they could "first take over the game, dominate, and finally deliver a knockout." Sounds like exactly what I said, and exactly what the players predicted would happen beforehand. You might want to get your facts straight as well - the Super Bowl win did not "force the merger into what is now the modern NFL," as the merger had been signed two years earlier, and was coming no matter what. "There is no parallel drawn"? Your entire point is to make parallels between Favre and Namath, and I stand by my point that those parallels are useless. You claim that one word is so significant ("from" instead of "for"), act like a guarantee about an entire season is even remotely comparable to one about a particular game, compare the opinions of a QB of a team that had played for years with his teammates to one who hadn't played one down with them, and think that the fact that that new QB, when coming to a team that just had a 4-12 record, doesn't act like the one who had just QB'd his team to a league title is somehow important. Sorry - it isn't.
I said exactly that. You are saying that Namath was predicting that the Colts would miss field goals and squander scoring opportunities and that he would then proceed to try to run the clock out - for half the game. That's a really sound argument if you ask me. The Jets didn't take over, dominate or deliver the knock out until well into the 3rd qtr. They played a ball control game at that point against a team that didn't have luck on its side that day, and as the game went on, pressed. That some Jets players said after the game and who knows how many years later after already was won and become mythology that they saw the film and could beat the Colts, doesn't mean anything. The interceptions killed the Colts. They weren't forced to throw because they couldn't run, or couldn't stop the Jets running attack. They moved the ball but couldn't cash in because of interceptions. I don't think that the Jets foresaw that in their film watching. It wasn't like the Jets were qualitatively dominant. They took strategic control of the game due to circumstances that occurred. I didn't say it created the merger, i said it forced it into what is now the modern NFL. Which I think is true. Namath getting drafted by the Jets and signed for a $427,000 contract was the bell-toll for the existing structure. Namath in Superbowl III was the finality of that. Namath represented an real economic threat to the old regime. His victory an the AFL's victory in the Championship Game represented an existential threat to the NFL. At that point, it was check-mate. That victory and the victory the year later by the Chiefs legitimized the league and the merger talks, and the modern NFL which incorporated many AFL rules and a more entertaining Namath-Style Offense was borne. The NFl had for log blacklisted blacks and certain colleges. But without legitimacy, who's to say that the NFL teams wouldn't keep breaking the agreement, like they had done in the past? SB III was a key anchor in the negotiations, and it isn't at all set in stone that the league would have become the modern NFL that we all see today without the SB III victory. Pretty much, everyone recognizes this argument as being pretty much the truth. i'm sorry you are just completely off base. it isn't a parallel. I am fitting favre into a context. It is ultimately a contrast, not a parallel....quite the opposite. The "guarantee / won't guarantee anything" narrative contrasts the opposing natures and character of the two players. The very fact is that Favre came in and entered into the historic "guarantee" narrative by insisting over and over that there's "never been any guarantees from me" and "there won't be any guarantees from me". He didn't have to say it, in the way it was said, again and again. There just so happens to be a "Guarantee Narrative" in Jets history that is being referenced, whether he knows it or not.
what in the world is so "well done sir" about a long list of circumstantial anecdotal references made after the game was already won, about the quality of the Colts Team that the Jets players saw through film and whatnot before the game? How does that prove that Jets were better? It is a commentary on perception and cognition, but not a proof of what we are talking about: which is the basis upon which Namath "knew" the Jets would win. stat's argument is that the Jets "knew" they were the dominant team, and that explains that. I don't think so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcome_bias and the granddaddy of them all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias there are many more. anecdotes referencing past events are not conclusive as proof.
