Mike Celizic

Of all the words in the English tongue, few are as weasely as these: “I felt like we needed to go in a different direction.”

Just ask Mike Sherman, the newly minted ex-coach of the Green Bay Packers, who was dismissed with those words from the team’s G.M., Ted Thompson. While you’re at it, ask the team’s living legend of a quarterback, Brett Favre, whose future probably doesn’t lie in the different direction in which Thompson wants to move.

What Thompson probably meant was that he wants to rebuild the team and doesn’t want Favre around any longer to delay the development of rookie quarterback Aaron Rogers. But you can’t cut a player of Favre’s stature, not in Green Bay, where his profile and popularity have reached Bunyanesque proportions. Nor can you bench him, not when he’s working on a streak of more than 200 consecutive starts.

What you can do is fire the coach to whom Favre had sworn devotion. Several times during this lost season, Favre had said that one of the factors that help him to decide whether to return next year was Sherman. If Sherman stayed, Favre was more likely to. If he left — or was pushed off the island — Favre was far less likely to come back.

Sherman isn’t a bad coach, not by a long shot. He had a miserable season this year, starting 1-7 and having to rally to finish at 4-12. But he also lost his top two running backs and his top wide receiver. And if the defense wasn’t the stoutest in the land, you had to give some of the discredit to Thompson and the front office for not providing better players to man the line.

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Before this season, Sherman had been 53-27, including back-to-back 12-4 seasons, in his first five years. He won three straight division titles, something only Mike Holmgren and Vince Lombardi had done as Packers coach, and made the post-season four times, winning just two of six playoff games and never making it to the NFC Championship game.

The playoff record was disappointing, but the overall body of work is not that of a coach who deserves firing, especially after the injury-riddled season the team just endured. But you have to feel the Packers felt they had no choice. The slow decline of the team has corresponded to a slow decline in Favre’s production. This year, the decline accelerated as Favre, probably thinking that he had to win games all by himself, threw interceptions at an alarming rate – 29 in 16 games against 20 touchdown passes.

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Favre can still play quarterback. Put him on a top team and he could be the difference between being good and making the playoffs and maybe making a run at the Super Bowl. If the Cowboys had had him this year instead of Drew “Vinnie Lite” Bledsoe, they’d probably be working on the game plan for this weekend’s wild-card game. If the Ravens had him, they’d be in instead of out. Same goes for the Jets.

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