The Off Season

A footnote in a historic career, Brett Favre’s rookie year in Atlanta was a strange, outrageous season with the NFL’s most dysfunctional team.

- Jeff Pearlman

TRADITIONALLY SPEAKING, the days that follow the draft serve as a period of mental adjustment. Young players come to grips with relocating to foreign cities, and organizations start the process of figuring out who fits where, and how. There are press conferences to attend and papers to sign and jerseys to hoist and pose behind. Although Falcons coach Jerry Glanville was far from enamored with the addition of a quarterback he didn’t want in the spring of 1991, he had no choice in the matter. Brett Favre was coming to Atlanta.

Before bread could be broken, though, Bus Cook—Favre’s naive agent—committed a classic rookie mistake. Having watched his client’s heartbreak over being a second round pick, and also seeing Raghib Ismail, the presumptive first overall selection in the draft, take big money from the Canadian Football League, Cook reached out to the Toronto Argonauts and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Then he informed the media. “That Canada stuff, it’s just us talking right now,” Cook told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on April 23. “Brett wants badly to play in Atlanta, but we have to explore all the options.”

The resulting freeze between player and franchise involved Glanville uttering the phrase “F That kid” inside the Atlanta offices 2,762,211 times. At long last, on July 17, Favre and the Falcons agreed to a three-year, $1.4 million deal that included a signing bonus somewhere between $350,000 and $400,000. Favre reported to Suwanee, Ga., the next day for the opening of training camp, commencing his one-year apprenticeship at the strangest and most dysfunctional shop in the National Football League.