Thank You, Brett Favre

I wanted to take a minute out of the baseball season- where Scott Boras has tightrope-walked his deadline deals down to the very last moment, squeezing every last drop of financial life out the farm systems of the worst teams in the league- to reflect upon the greatest saga of modern sports history: the Brett Favre retirement/unretirement story.

The blitz of media coverage, driven almost exclusively by ESPN, has successfully distracted the majority of America from not just the major sports actually being played right now, but also from the real off-season stories of the NFL. The Worldwide Leader has exploited every rumor of this back-and-forth affair, and now, at last, Favre has officially signed with Minnesota, prolonging the discussion for another calander year. For this, I want to thank the man.

I want to thank Favre for helping divert attention from the wide receiver who shot himself in the leg when a gun slipped out of his sweatpants at a night club. I want to thank him for pulling the cameras from the quarterback who fought and killed animals, but thinks he deserves a second-chance at being a multi-millionaire. More than anything, I want to thank him for keeping the newspaper columns filled with something other than stories of the wide reciever who won't even do any jailtime after running over and killing a man while drunk and speeding.

Because while the rest of America tries to decide whether or not a purple #4 jersey looks out of place to them, I will be doing something else- anything but watching the NFL. The combination of heinous off-season offenses, coupled with the complete lack of apppropriate media response- which paled in comparison with the non-story that is, has been and will continue to be Brett Favre- has opened my eyes to the truth I have known all along, but have been unwilling to embrace.

I hate the NFL. And now, I am done with it.

I will not watch a single moment of the season this year, save the replays to which I will be subjected on SportsCenter. If I am invited to a Super Bowl party, I will be polite and sit through the game, but mostly for the commercials.

My boycott of America's most popular and worst sport was cemented as I watched Favre exit his private jet for the black Escalade to take him to the Vikings practice facility. The fact that there was a new helicopter flying over the tarmac to get that shot told me all I needed to know about this terrible spectacle, and how far out of control it has spiraled.

Yesterday a friend of mine who works in baseball explained his own dislike of the NFL in a way that I think many of us would like to, but don't have the courage to express.

"I just don't like the people in the game," he explained. "I hate to say it, and to make generalizations, but it's true."

It's true for me too. The biggest knock on baseball right now is that players used substances that were not banned at the time to try to make themselves into better baseball players. Football players have shot themselves, killed dogs, and committed vehicular manslaughter, all in this past off-season alone.

And the biggest story? Brett Favre.

So thank you Brett, for helping me make the best decision of my sports-loving life. The rest of you can join me during the work stoppage in 2011. Read More!