Newspaper polls in Milwaukee and St. Louis of NFL scouts favored Packers quarterback Brett Favre over Rams quarterback Kurt Warner last week. A recount could be pending after Favre’s six interceptions Sunday.
No vote is necessary on which team is superior. “I’d say the Rams are the odds-on favorite to win it all,” Favre said.
Warner turned fan during his team’s 45-17 win. “I think we are a better team now than we were in 1999. I think we are more solid,” Warner said.
Rams coach Mike Martz, also a big fan of his team, called the game “the best performance that I have seen and been a part of by any football team on any level.”
Packers coach Mike Sherman was reluctant to anoint the Rams as head and shoulders above everybody else because the Packers fell so flat it was hard to evaluate.
“I don’t want to take anything away from the Rams,” Sherman said. “But I don’t think we got our butt kicked physically. I don’t think there is that big a gap between us.”
Favre and Warner greeted each other before the game but did not see each other afterward. It was the first time Favre, 33, and Warner, 30, had seen each other since their 1994 Packers training camp.
Warner didn’t need to outplay Favre on Sunday and didn’t mind playing a limited role.
“It is a great luxury that you don’t have to make great big plays and force plays in there,” Warner said. “It was nice to . . . just watch our defense play.”
The Packers did not think the loss erased their 12-4 season or signaled a shaky future.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Favre said. “Whether you lose by a point or you lose by 50, whether you throw one pick or throw six, it doesn’t really matter. The bottom line is we’re going home.
“There’s a lot of teams that wish they had the opportunity to play in this game. I’m not trying to make it sweeter than it may appear, but just getting here isn’t enough. And if our guys will think about that and get better from it, we can be in the Super Bowl next year.”
Asked if six interceptions was “inconceivable” to him, Favre said: “I could have thrown eight had we gotten the ball back. But I’m going to keep chucking it.”
Said Sherman: “He’s had a heck of a year. Today wasn’t one of his best days. If anything, maybe we wanted it too much.”
“My plan is to make everyone forget what happened today,” Favre said.
Aeneas Williams, who picked off two of Favre’s passes, said: “One of the things we wanted to do as a defense was to catch the ball. We spent a lot of time looking at film. Brett makes good plays, but sometimes his receivers miss those torpedoes he throws, so I knew that the key coming into today was that we needed to catch the ball well as a defense, and that is what we did.”
The Rams’ defensive coordinator, Lovie Smith, arrived this year from Tampa Bay, where the Bucs shared the defensive strategy of most of the NFC Central Division against Favre: He will throw passes that a defense has a chance to intercept.
Never has the strategy worked so well.
