UNDATED (WTAQ) - Brett Favre will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this weekend.
But the Green Bay Packers legend meant more to the team and the NFL than just winning on the field.
"Brett Favre was almost the perfect storm, as it were, for sports marketing, particularly here in Green Bay," says Kevin Quinn, Dean of the Donald J. Schneider School of Business and Economics at St. Norbert College in De Pere. "He was colorful, good-looking guy, kind of an everyman, unassuming especially early on, good ol' boy who liked to have fun and here in Green Bay, we like to have fun we know that."
Favre became the starter for the Green Bay Packers in the fourth game of the 1992 season. The next year, the Fox television network bid $1.58 billion to get the broadcast rights for NFC football. The NFL accepted the bid, which topped CBS' offer. That 1993 season culminated in Favre leading the Packers to the playoffs for the first time in a decade.
"The money in the 1990s, partly because of a booming economy and a consumer booming economy, and partly because sports were recognized as crossover more generally, the money just flowed in," Quinn says. "He benefitted from Michael Jordan, he was concurrent with Tiger Woods in some ways, but those sports figures were probably more dominant in marketing then, than they probably are now."
The gunslinger from Kiln, Mississippi, won the first of his 3 MVP awards in 1995. That next season, Favre would lead the Packers to a win in Super Bowl 31 over the New England Patriots. The game was Fox's first Super Bowl under their initial TV contract.
"As big as the NFL was in the 1980s, they took a step up in the 1990s," explains Quinn. "During the 90s, as the NBA began to fade a little bit after the Jordan years, all of a sudden you had the NFL and Brett Favre. He was the right person at the right place at the right time that he just became bigger than life."
Favre was such a "crossover" star, in 1998 he made a famous cameo in the hit movie There's Something About Mary starring Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz. Add in the number of national endorsements for products like Wrangler jeans, Nike, Sears and MasterCard, you have a guy who companies put their trust in.
Quinn adds not to mention what became a fashion staple during that decade
"Here in Green Bay, you would see people at the bank wearing a Packers shirt instead of a suit and tie and that was considered normal here. That was not true everywhere else, but it is now," says Quinn. "The NFL, I think, became more of a merchandising brand company during the 1990s at the same time this was happening. So he was their ''L’Oréal spokesperson' in a sense. Truly from a fashion and lifestyle and brand identification point of view, more just than football."
Fast forward 10 years and there was a messy divorce between Favre and the Packers, which culminated in his trade to the New York Jets. The next year, he would sign with the rival Minnesota Vikings completing the angry fallout from his departure from Green Bay. Despite all of that history, Quinn says Favre remains a strong brand.
"Two things are in play, one time heals all wounds and instead of focusing on that difficult time when the Packers had made the decision to move on before he was ready to move on, and how the fans reacted to that," Quinn says. "I also think there's a greater recognition about the degree to which that this is a business. This idea of loyalty is a little bit of a fiction, we don't want to admit that but it is."
Quinn believes that the appeal of someone like Brett Favre not only hits people in the heart because he's a Packer, but because his is a story of redemption and with the younger generation more apt to learning history, the legend of Favre can continue to live on.
"It's a personal thing, yes he was a great football player, but there was something about him personally that you cared about what he was doing. People that make mistakes, and rebound from those mistakes, American is the land of second chances," says Quinn. "I walk around campus and I hear classic rock from the 60s and the 70s coming out of the dorm rooms. We would've never listened to stuff that was 40 or 50 years old when I was in college. Now that retro stuff is cool, young people are more willing to look at what people who came before them did. Think about somebody who's 10 or 12-years-old, they don't remember Brett Favre other than just as a former player, and I would be willing to guess, especially here in Green Bay, they're going to pay attention to him for a long, long time."
You can get more coverage of Brett Favre going into the Hall of Fame here.