Friday, September 4, 2015

It's MARK BRUNELL days until we get married

The Packers in the 90's and early 2000's were semi-famous for having notable quarterbacks as backups. They may not have been notable at the time, but they became so after leaving Green Bay.

The most famous is Kurt Warner, who was with the Packers for just a short time near the mid-90's. He went on to earn a couple league MVP awards, won a Super Bowl, and should be headed to the Hall of Fame.

Matt Hasselbeck was also a good one, earning himself a couple Pro Bowl bids and taking the Seahawks to the Super Bowl, which they would have won were it not for more than a few awfully suspicious penalties.

Even Aaron Brooks led a few record-setting offensive units for New Orleans, including a couple while Mike McCarthy coached there, well before he came to Green Bay.

But my favorite famous Packers back-up is Mark Brunell, in large part because I had one of his football cards when I was little.

I can't remember exactly what it looked like, but it must have stood out for some reason. Brunell was on to playing for the Jaguars, and at the time they had some pretty cool uniforms. Though I knew nothing about him as a player, that card sold me on Mark Brunell, and I followed his career after that.

Brunell ended up moving around a lot, playing just two games with the Packers, then heading for Jacksonville, making a stop in Washington, winning a Super Bowl as a backup in New Orleans, then finally playing out the last days of his career in New York. He played pretty sparingly at the end, only throwing three passes during his final season, but he was still on an NFL roster at the age of 41, which is a lot more than most guys can play.

I've always wondered if Brunell ended up playing the last couple years of his career just for money rather than because he actually enjoyed what he was doing. He'd gotten caught up in a few bad investments (and has even been accused of starting a few bad investments himself) and I know they cost him a lot of money. Did what started out as a dream end up as a grind just to make ends meet? I don't have a good answer, but I know that Brunell was an interesting player for more reasons than one.

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