The Green Bay Packers make their annual visit to the Metrodome tomorrow – but this is no ordinary Packer/Viking showdown, for tomorrow, cheesehead god Brett Favre will attempt to pass Dan Marino and take sole possession of first-place on the all-time NFL touchdown pass list. In our house.
I ask you – could there be anything more sickening than the thought of Brett Favre breaking such a significant record under the Vikings’ roof? It’s bad enough that Favre has the Super Bowl ring, the accolades, the adoration of millions while the Vikings remain the eternal chokers – but now he has to surpass Marino right in front of our faces too? When well it ever end?
Of course, there’s no guarantee that Favre will break the record tomorrow, despite the feeling of inevitability surrounding the whole event. There’s always a chance that the Viking defense could rise up and prevent this horrible calamity from occurring. That the Vikings could put together a blitz package that befuddles Favre; that his old teammate Darren Sharper could pick off a couple of would-be touchdown flings, breaking the old Vicodin-addict’s heart. This is football after all – Favre may be a quarterbacking god, but there are still eleven guys on the other side trying to stop him.
Then again, these are the Vikings. The same team that got ripped to shreds by Tom Brady last year. The team that made Damon Huard look like Len Dawson at times in the second half last weekend. A team whose pass-defense, in short, is known to sometimes disappear as suddenly and thoroughly as Jimmy Hoffa. If that happens against Flinging Favre, then that number could wind up closer to 430 than 420 by the end of the day. And God knows the Packers are going to have to throw it – they have no running backs, and even if they did, the Vikings would probably stuff them like the clerks at Best Buy telling the last losers in line there are no more copies of Halo 3 left and they’ll just have to ask Santa Claus for it or pay a thousand bucks on eBay.
So yeah, odds are Favre will get the record tomorrow. And when he does they will probably stop the game, and all the Packer fans will stand and cheer – and the Vikings will once again be on the short end of some act of quarterbacking heroism. We should be used to it by now at least – after Young’s epic run, and Vick’s, and all the times Favre himself has made us look like chumps. Viking fans, I assume, will mostly stand and politely applaud; a few of the drunker ones will probably hurl abuse or perhaps shower their Packer-loving companions with alcohol. It will all be quite grim – particularly this year, with the Packers off good at 3-0, and the Vikings struggling to find a QB who can take the reins of the kick-ass offense and lead it to some semblance of genuine kick-assness. The only silver-lining in this is that at least the Packers didn’t make the trade for Randy Moss – because Favre breaking the record in the Dome by throwing it to Moss…well, there might’ve been some suicides if that happened.