GREEN BAY, WIS. — The education on this weekend's first trip to see a Packers game at Lambeau Field began well before the final destination. At a bar in the small town of Thorp, Wis., which is about halfway between Minneapolis and Green Bay but feels much closer to the latter, conversation Saturday turned to the Packers' last-second loss at Carolina.
"I think Favre should have just run it in," one of the locals, when it wasn't his turn at the pool table, said before correcting himself. "I mean Rodgers."
Maybe when you've had a quarter-century of great quarterbacking, the two men blur together. Or maybe there's more to it.
Inside the stadium for what would become an 18-16 Packers loss to the Lions — a team that hadn't won at Lambeau since 1991, the year before Favre arrived in Green Bay, which is not a coincidence — the grumbling about Rodgers began early.
As Rodgers danced in the pocket before flipping a pass short of an intended receiver — a scene that would repeat itself many times Sunday — one fan within earshot actually shouted, "Quit making all those commercials and complete a pass."
At the postgame tailgate, not to be confused with the pregame tailgate where the green and gold fans' consumption was done under much happier circumstances, rational discussions were nonetheless still possible. There's a lot of season left, we agreed. And this upcoming game Sunday at TCF Bank Stadium will be a huge affair.
What was particularly fascinating in a lot of these conversations was how on multiple occasions Packers fans again slipped up and said Favre when they meant Rodgers — and how so many of them, even if Rodgers jerseys rival Clay Matthews jerseys as the most popular at Lambeau, still have plenty of complaints about the best quarterback I've ever seen (Favre, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning included).
But there's this: For all his greatness, and for as likable as he is, Rodgers' style does not resonate like Favre's did in Wisconsin. Rodgers has caution as both a virtue as a fault. He improvises well, but his real strength is the ruthless efficiency of his precision passes.
