>> Let’s get this straight: Coach Greg Ryan is responding to his clearly wrongheaded choice to bench  US keeper Hope Solo by…continuing to bench Hope Solo? Even after it became clear that Solo was incited to lash out at his decision by a rude order from PR flack Aaron Heifetz? Yeesh - as Rome said the other day, Ryan needs to go home and learn to make some orange slices.

>> No, it’s not how he got rich - but consarnit, T. Boone Pickens wins bets.

It sounds ludicrous, I know. How can a quarterback as lauded as Brett Favre - ESPN darling, king of the endorsement scene (well, til Manning came along), John Madden’s numero uno mancrush - actually be an underrated quarterback?

Well, that’s easy. With Favre about to set the all-time touchdown passing record, every talking head is getting into the ranking game, and other than the eloquent piece by Len Pasquarelli, few are giving Favre the credit he deserves for his career. The other day, Ron Jaworski stopped stroking Donovan McNabb’s ego long enough to tell ESPN viewers that Brett Favre isn’t even in his top six, and Dan Marino isn’t in his top eight. And even those experts at Yahoo and Fox Sports who rank Favre highly put him barely in their top five, if at all.

As if their bias toward the present - instead of ranking a career - could be any clearer, many are putting Favre below Tom Brady. Let’s nip this in the bud: Brady has won three Super Bowls, each time on a team with a fantastic defense (Favre hasn’t had a top five defense since 1998), each time with a lead achieved by a Hall of Fame clutch kicker, each time under a coach who - cheater or not - is certainly in the top tier of NFL coaches, something which can’t be said of Favre’s signal callers (let’s be honest: together, Rhodes, Sherman, and McCarthy couldn’t hold Belichick’s jock). Brady has the rings, yes - but are you really going to say Trent Dilfer, Mark Rypien, and Brad Johnson are better quarterbacks than Marino? Or if the number of rings matter, that Aikman and Bradshaw are better than Favre or Elway? That’s just not an argument you can make with a straight face, or unless you’re a total homer for your team of choice.

Placing Favre out of the top five quarterbacks of all time club ignores his consistent statistical success when compared to others. I’m fed up with it. So maybe it’s time for a little refresher course, culled from the wonderful folks at Pro Football Reference.

Brett Favre: Top Five Quarterback

• Favre is the all time leader in wins, with 150, despite playing one fewer year than Elway and two fewer than Marino. The only active QB with a shot to catch him is Peyton Manning, with 94 regular season wins, which should allow him to pass Favre when Manning is 37. Adding postseason wins allows Tom Brady (82 regular and postseason wins) a hope of catching Favre, but as it also increases Favre’s total to 161 wins, Brady would likely have to play until he is 38 or 39 to match it.
• Favre is the all time leader in completions, and the only QB in NFL history to pass the 5,000 completion mark. The only active QB with a shot to catch him is Peyton Manning. If Favre retired tomorrow, and Manning’s average completions per season doesn’t dip at all, Peyton would still have to play until he was 38 to catch Favre, and 37 to match his consecutive 300+ completion seasons (Favre has 15).
• Eight of Favre’s single season completion totals rank in the top 50 all time in terms of completions per season, higher than any other QB and stretching from 1994 to 2005.
• Favre is second in the all time list of passing yards, exactly 3,000 yards behind Dan Marino. If Favre returns for a 17th season - remembering that Marino played 18 - he will pass Marino. Again, the only active QB with a shot to catch him is Peyton Manning. If Favre retired tomorrow, and Manning maintains his average for yards per season with no drop off, he’d still have to play until he was 37 to catch Favre.
• Favre has scored more points than any other Quarterback in NFL history (2,598 at the start of the season). While Manning will almost certainly catch this, he will almost certainly not match Favre in consecutive seasons with 30 or more touchdown passes - Favre has five, while only 5 Quarterbacks in NFL history have even managed two. Manning has never had back to back seasons with 30 or more touchdowns.
• As an iron-man quarterback, Favre is unmatched, with 241 consecutive starts this Sunday (261 including the postseason). Only one player in NFL history, defensive end Jim Marshall, has more - and it’s much easier to get that record at a position other than QB. Favre will pass Marshall’s total later this year, assuming he stays healthy. He will also pass Fran Tarkenton (244) for most career games as a quarterback.
• Finally, as we all know, Favre is one touchdown away from passing Dan Marino on the all time list for touchdown passes. But in terms of total touchdowns, he’s already four ahead of Marino - including rushing touchdowns and quarterback sneaks.

For what it’s worth, here’s my personal list:

1. Johnny Unitas
2. Joe Montana
3. Brett Favre
4. Dan Marino
5. John Elway

I feel pretty confident about this, as it dovetails well with the Sporting News list from a few years back that was Unitas, Montana, Elway, Favre. And yes, Manning will move up this list, and deserves to. But he isn’t yet in this tier statistically, and while we all know how consistent he is, we can’t put him there yet.

Assuming Manning has as long a career as these fellows had, he will eventually pass Elway, Marino, and Favre, though the top two will be hard to break through - Unitas because he accomplished so much in an era when the forward pass was a newfangled invention, and even moreso because he played in the era of shortened seasons, and has fewer games played than any others on this list, Montana because he has come to symbolize the ideal clutch QB in NFL history. Brady will have to keep up the pace of the first three games of the 2007 season from here on out if he’s ever going to have the statistics to be considered in this company.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this: As this season began, since the moment when Brett Favre took the field replacing Don Majkowski on September 20, 1992, no NFL team has won more games than the Green Bay Packers. Considering the era we’re in, when franchises rise and fall quickly, and the talent pool Favre has had to work with for the past several years, that’s simply astounding, and it’s the mark of a truly exceptional leader.

>> Chargers fans, get used to it.  I grew up with the horrible Norv Turner as an ever-present destructive force of pathetic idiocy, crushing all of my dreams for nearly a decade of Sundays.  This is going to get worse before it gets better.

After getting off to a good start, this site - and all of my others - went down thanks to the little Jatol happening.

While I had backed up most of my work on other sites, this one was only two months old, and I hadn’t yet - so I lost most of what I’d done in terms of design…I’ll have to rebuild that. But I’m with a new host now, so hopefully this time we’ll stay up.

As the NFL season returns to us after the longest offseason in professional sports, let’s stop to give credit to the players in tonight’s opener not named Manning, Bush, Harrison, Brees, Wayne or Freeney.

Let’s hear it for Ross Tucker, an undrafted offensive lineman whose career opened and closed with the Washington Redskins, writes his story for Sports Illustrated. He feels lucky, but more than that - read it yourself.

It just occurred to me as I write this how fortunate I am to have a supportive wife who is happily married to an unemployed, overweight, and slightly balding 28-year-old man. I will definitely be able to get a job and lose some weight now that I am done playing, but there is not much I can do about the balding part.

Although all but a few of the cut players attended college, I’m sure more than half have no idea what they’re going to do now. Most of these young men are facing failure and rejection for the first time. Getting cut from a team or being anything less than the star has never even been a consideration for them until this point…I consider myself very fortunate in the sense that I have been preparing for this moment from the time my career started. When I first made the Redskins as an undrafted rookie in 2001, I realized that might be my only year, so I invested the money, continued driving my 1990 Jeep Cherokee, and began thinking about what I would want to do when football was over. I was keenly aware that football was just a temp job. I have a couple of business interests, such as www.gobigrecruiting.com, that will occupy my time, and I am more than excited about the possibility of writing or talking about football for a living. I figure if I can’t play anymore, that would be the next best thing.

But it is not the same as playing. Nothing else in life can replicate the feeling of running into another man in front of 90,000 people and hitting him as hard as you possibly can. My mom will probably hate reading this, but more than the paycheck or the camaraderie of the locker room, I will really miss the violence. It is just an amazing and pure primal feeling that you really don’t understand if you have never had the chance to do it.

It is hard to know when it will hit me the hardest that my time has come. It could be on Sundays when it is hard for me to watch the TV and see the guys I know playing. It is more likely that it will sink in when I sit in the stands of a random high school football game on a Friday night and my eyes fill up as they play the National Anthem…

Life goes on. And yes: I still love football.

Let’s hear it for the Ross Tuckers of football. Let’s hear it for the linemen who brutalize each other on every play with more energy than the overhyped and delicate wideouts and cornerbacks who yearn for the closeup and the highlight reel.

Let’s hear it for the undrafted and the irrelevant, for the men who never dreamed they’d make it this far, who give it all because they don’t have anything to lose - for seventh rounders and arena league castoffs, for Division I-AA players who beat out draft picks, and for grocery store clerks who hoist the Lombardi because they forgot they weren’t supposed to be any good.

Let’s hear if for the guys who don’t need big contracts, don’t need hot rides, don’t need their names on ESPN, don’t even need helmets - they just want the chance to play, to compete, to win, to have one small moment of victory.

Let’s hear it for the players who will never be on the cover of a video game, whose name will never be worn on jerseys across a stadium, who may not even be recognized when they’re seen in public.

Let’s hear it for the kids who’ll go to a stadium this weekend for the first time, who cheer as their team takes the field, and feel the whisper of that magical connection that comes with a hundred years of gridiron competition, who may not know or recognize Rice, Payton, Brown, Graham, Butkus, Nitschke, Lott, Greene, Huff, Thorpe, Unitas, Nagurski, Baugh, or Deacon Jones…but soon, they will.

Because the gridiron doesn’t care where you were drafted. It doesn’t care about your sponsorships or your forty time. It doesn’t care about your name, your faith, the color of your skin, the country of your birth. It doesn’t care if you are tired, or hurt, your body screaming against everything your mind is ordering it to do.

The gods of football care only about who wants it more. Who will see that moment as it comes, and seize it with all their might.

Game on.

I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

-Vince Lombardi

(Originally posted by Ben on September 6, 2007)

As most of you know, I worked in the White House Speechwriting Office during the summer of 2002 as an intern – doing research, acting as support staff for the lead speechwriters, and contributing here and there – prior to joining the Administration as a speechwriter for Tommy Thompson in the fall. So at first, I foolishly thought Matt Scully’s article in The Atlantic about the inner workings of the office under Mike Gerson was a bit too insider-focused to get a lot of attention – who wants to read that kind of office gossip, after all? Just a bit of bad blood between coworkers, nothing particularly glamorous or tawdry about it.

Peter Baker’s A1 followup story in The Washington Post over the weekend shows how wrong I was. Apparently the squabble over Matt’s depiction of the oft-profiled Mike as a attention-loving scribe has just enough rancorous appeal in it to satisfy readers during the long hot gossip-starved DC summer. Vitter’s old news, so a sniping match between wonks will have to suffice.

Good speechwriting breeds a particular kind of personality. Few successful speechwriters are particularly egotistical. You have to lack the desire for ownership of your best writing, yet be a skilled enough writer to quiet your own voice, and instead adopt the vocabulary and tone of a political leader with whom you may have nothing in common, not even policy views.

Yet there’s another facet of personality there, as well – one that Henry Kissinger described eloquently in a brief paragraph in his memoirs which speaks of a long history of internal strife over remarks:

The choice of speechwriters always determined the tone and not infrequently the substance of a Presidential speech. The common conception is that speechwriters are passive instruments who docilely craft into elegant prose the policy thought of their principals. On the contrary, the vast majority of them are frustrated principals themselves who seek to use their privileged position to put over their own ideas.

There’s a lot of truth in that. And it’s one of the reasons that, for years, it was part of the unwritten speechwriter code that you 1) never publicly take credit for a line someone else delivered, 2) never let yourself become a story, and 3) you all rise and sink together as a team. That’s just part of what it means to be one of the people sitting behind the decisionmakers, the men and women who actually sit at the table.

The speechwriting process just helps bolster those rules. The speeches I contributed to in 2002 were really just anecdotes or lines here and there in relatively unimportant addresses – and on the rare occasion where a significant amount of material that I gave to the writers to put in a first draft actually made it through, I was just happy to have contributed. I’d occasionally tell friends to turn on C-SPAN or read a transcript where I’d contributed a key anecdote or thought there were some particularly excellent lines – the lovely Kristen Mugford (now the lovely Kristen Hayner ) and I spent many hours putting together some great stuff for the Ohio State Commencement address – but that was all.

There wasn’t a single speech that went through that wasn’t a group effort, and we understood that we were just a small part of a hard working team. That was the same rationale that informed my later speechwriting work. My attitude was always that if a line went over well, it was just inspired by the boss. If it didn’t, or if it got flack or became controversial, then hey, that was from me. That, I think, is the proper attitude of any staffer.

Personally, were I in Matt’s position, I’d probably have let Gerson keep going with his profiles and basking in praise without offering a public response (the same choice John McConnell has apparently made). It just seems petty to get into squabbles about such things after the fact. But then, I’ve never had Gerson do the kind of petty things he evidently did…according to that article, the credit-claiming internally was far worse than I ever thought or witnessed. From Matt’s perspective, it seems that Mike had a tendency to confuse himself with the man at the table. Everyone’s heard the “fine China” line already, but this is the one portion that seemed particularly bad to me:

I happened to be sitting at Mike’s laptop when it came time for us to send the very last draft to senior staff, and Mike, noticing that I had cc’d John and myself, stopped me: “Don’t do that! You can print copies from here!” I said, “Michael, why can’t I copy John and me?” This brought a frantic admission: “Because they don’t know you’re involved!” “And why is it a secret that we’re doing this together?” Because it was all very confidential, Mike explained as he rushed off—senior staff didn’t want anything leaking out. This performance was repeated at the White House, when Mike insisted that the usual author identifications not appear on drafts going to the president, or pouted when our department secretary put all three names there anyway. He seemed to think this was standard practice—just “the way it’s done” in Washington.

Matt was, and is, a brilliant and quirky man, and a very personable guy. He liked to sit in his office and eat his odd-smelling vegan food, but other than that, he was always circulating in the offices, joking, charming, laughing. He was an odd cat, but he was very fun to be around, and he kept people from stressing out too much in a very stressful time. He was fit and happy. He and John – two people who couldn’t be more unalike in lifestyle – would shoot the breeze for hours, having epic, hilarious conversations around speechmaking. Being in the room with them for just a few minutes could teach you more about speechwriting than years of classes. The most enjoyable part of my job was bringing them research for a minor speech, or an anecdote for a bigger one, and start them riffing on some historical figure or a ridiculous story from their long history of speechwriting.

[A side note: in my opinion, John was the most talented of the bunch, and the writer who got the President's voice the best. I didn't know it at the time, but the article seems to indicate that Matt agrees. In response to Ramesh's point, let me just say that JPod is absolutely correct. You could go through your entire life as a political insider without hearing about John McConnell, but if you saw his work laid out end to end on a page, you'd be shocked at how much exceptional material he's created, and how much you recognize. But John being John, you never will.]

The office was really quite enjoyable when I was there. Junior writer Ed Walsh was hilarious. The quiet, retiring Joe Shattan was a pleasure to work with, neurotic, shy, yet very endearing. Pete Wehner is a policy nerd’s nerd, but he embraces it – steady and responsible, he was like the MiniMe version of Bill Bennett in many ways (he’d written for Bennett for years prior). Working with Pete for several months illustrated that he was (and is) truly unique in Washington circles: he had no apparent vices, at all. And loyal to a fault, constant as the northern star. I am not at all surprised that Pete is siding with Mike in this.

Gerson, on the other hand, came across as a bit of a loner, the least interested in others. He never seemed to want to be in the office, and wasn’t the kind of person to say hello to you in the halls of the EEOB. He didn’t bother to learn people’s names if you weren’t important to him. I was lucky enough to have lunch with him in the White House Mess one day, and it was ridiculously, disappointingly dull. He’s clearly a genius for words, and a very good speechwriter, but he gave the impression of not having time for anything except sharing his brilliance. Privately, my friends and I compared him to Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan – the kind of fellow who thought of himself as a normal all-American guy, but if you pushed him to talk about what he really valued, he’d start with Willie Mays and quickly end up at “Sentimental Education by Flaubert.”

The only time I saw Mike brighten up to a significant degree was when a group of Wheaton kids came in at one point, and he shared stories about his experiences working for the President over the past several years. His respect for POTUS was demonstrable and real, and he was emphatically supportive of the mission of the White House. He liked being in that role, and it seemed to bring out the best in him. Thinking back, it makes me wonder if the bulk of the praising profiles of Mike that so irked Matt weren’t motivated by a similar rationale; not so much that Mike wanted to shine, but that he thought being more public about the reasoning behind remarks would illustrate how seriously the White House took the issues they were addressing.

Or perhaps this is just Kissinger’s line coming true once again. We can’t know motivations, after all. I prefer to assume the best in this circumstance.

Mike, Matt and John were given more access to the President than any previous Republican speechwriting team (infamously, Noonan had never met Reagan when she became a speechwriter for him, and didn’t meet with him frequently even after coming on staff). They did exceptional work for him as a team. I was proud, for a short time and in very small ways, to contribute to that team effort. And it will be very sad if, years from now, people remember this speechwriters’ spat instead of the eloquent, inspiring, and meaningful work that the whole of the team did, when the country needed it so.

(Originally posted by Ben on August 13, 2007)

>> Josh hosted a podcast with Hunter Baker and myself on issues of faith and public life. Listen to it here.

>> Don’t look now, but the famous Football Outsiders DVOA ratings have the Washington Redskins making a significant improvement this season, mostly based on third down performance issues. Read it, and know that MLB fans don’t have a monopoly on stat geekery.

>> Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson are not shy about the truth in the Duke lacrosse case: “The power of extremist professors will continue to spread unless mainstream liberal academics, alumni and trustees stop deferring to them and stop letting them pack departments with more and more ideologically eccentric, intellectually mediocre allies.”