The announcement that the legendary Green Bay Packers will never again play with them breaks my heart.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame now counts 33 players from the Green Bay Packers. The only team with more players sent to Canton is the Chicago Bears. The only thing the Packers accomplished was win, regardless of whether it was under Vince Lombardi, Brett Favre, or Aaron Rodgers.
Pro Football Reference uses an Approximate Value statistic to “put a single number on the seasonal value of a player at any position from any year,” and this list was created by measuring each player’s Approximate Value. Honors, figures, and records were also taken into account. Now let’s get going!
After Brett Favre left to join the New York Jets, Aaron Rodgers—the greatest Packer of all time—took over the offense. In Lambeau Field’s frozen tundra, Rodgers developed into a prolific passer who unleashed an aerial assault on the league. The four-time MVP is among the best quarterbacks of his generation and won the Super Bowl with the Packers in 2010. The Packers were always a threat to win the Super Bowl when Rodgers was starting quarterback.
When Favre was traded to the Packers in 1992, the team’s fortunes took a turn for the better. After beginning his career with the Atlanta Falcons, he was traded to the Packers, where he started an NFL-record 321 consecutive games and won three MVP awards in a row. The Packers struggled to make the playoffs in the 1970s and 1980s, but Favre’s arrival in 1992 brought football back to Green Bay.
Not that Willie Davis from the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won two World Series.
During the Vince Lombardi era, Davis—a Hall of Fame defensive tackle for the Packers in the 1960s—was a formidable presence on the defensive line. Those defenses would not have been the same without him.
