GREEN BAY, Wis. -- There's something poetic about the Green Bay Packers celebrating Brett Favre on Thanksgiving. If not for him, the Lambeau Field in which his retired No. 4 will be unveiled on Thursday night might not look the way it does today -- and maybe the iconic franchise would have relocated by now.
Although it's hard to imagine the community-owned Packers leaving the NFL's smallest market, had the club's losing ways from the 1970s and 1980s continued into the 1990s and beyond, the franchise may very well have lost the 2000 referendum that secured the 0.5 percent local sales tax that funded the stadium renovation project.
Without the redeveloped Lambeau Field, which opened in 2003, the Packers would have continued plummeting in the league rankings for local revenue, and retired president and CEO Bob Harlan isn't sure that the NFL would have stood by and watched the club struggle to field a competitive team each year.
"As tough as that referendum was, I'm not sure we could have won it if we didn't have a football team that was successful at the time," said Harlan, recalling how the measure passed 53-47. "If we were back in the ‘70s and ‘80s trying to get that tax money, I'm not sure we would've won the vote."
And without Favre, the Packers might have kept right on losing. In the 24 seasons before general manager Ron Wolf gave up a first-round pick to acquire Favre in February 1992, the Packers managed just five winning seasons and two playoff berths. This year marks the 24th season since the historic trade with the Atlanta Falcons, and the 7-3 Packers are aiming for their 20th winning season and 18th playoff berth over that span.
Although Favre was part of a group that turned the franchise around -- with Harlan as president, Wolf as GM, Mike Holmgren as coach and defensive end Reggie White as the perception-changing free-agent signee, the 1996 team won Super Bowl XXXI -- his greatness at the game's most important position changed everything.
"When we came here, we were told we were coming to the cesspool of the National Football League. I'm not kidding you. People wondered why anybody would take a job here," recalled Wolf, who was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame this summer and was celebrated at halftime of the team's Nov. 15 game against Detroit. "Well, we were able to take this and turn it around because of its marvelous tradition and history and made it very quickly into a place that people wanted to come and play."
The stadium renovation, which was completed in 2003, resulted in a seismic shift on the team's balance sheet. In a three-year span starting with 1997, the Packers had fallen from ninth to 20th in the league in total revenue and would have kept falling as other teams built new stadiums. Last fiscal year, when the club generated a record $149 million in local revenue, the Packers ranked ninth again.
"I could never make the threat that we were going to move. People would say, ‘What are you going to do if you lose this vote?' And I'd say, ‘We're just going to have a very bad football team,'" Harlan recalled. "Paul Jadin, the mayor of Green Bay at the time, we would meet weekly for those eight months to talk about strategy, and he never said a word until it was totally finished. And then he said, ‘I always thought if you lost the referendum, I thought this team would be out of here by 2015.'
"The team would have become so non-competitive, the NFL might have just said, ‘We're just going to move you, we've got that authority.' Maybe they wouldn't have, but we certainly would have been a very bad football team. If you don't have that local revenue today, you simply cannot compete. If we didn't have the stadium, we wouldn't have kept Aaron Rodgers, we wouldn't have kept Clay Matthews, we couldn't afford to keep players."
And Wolf thinks most of the credit goes to Favre, who'll see his name and No. 4 join Don Hutson (14), Tony Canadeo (3), Bart Starr (15), Ray Nitschke (66) and Reggie White (92) on the north end zone facade. Wolf also said he believes the Favre trade is "95 percent" responsible for his own induction into the Hall of Fame.
"Everybody talks about Lambeau Field and what it is now," Wolf said. "The old Yankee Stadium, they used to say it was ‘The House That Ruth Built.' There's no question that that new Lambeau Field is ‘The House That Favre Built.' A lot of us want to take credit, but Brett Favre did it. When you look up there at those six jerseys that are retired -- two from the Lombardi Era, two from the Lambeau Era and two from the Wolf Era -- that's going to be a big thing for me. A big, big thing.
"No one deserves it more than he does. He took this franchise and turned it around."
