Jay Mariotti Nfl

GREEN BAY, Wis. -- Shame on them for booing him, mocking him, staging funerals for him, wearing flip-flops and eating waffle fries to ridicule him. The hostility toward Brett Favre was an embarrassment to a community that never looked smaller, an affront to the idea that the publicly owned Packers and their fans form a unique family bond amid the greed and sleaze of 21st-century sports. If the Cheeseheads truly had perspective, they would have stood and applauded the man whose swaggering presence defined a franchise and state for 16 years, and then they'd have rooted like hell for their boys to beat the old dude and the despised Minnesota Vikings.

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Upon hearing that Jay Cutler was engaging in trash-tweeting with one Chad Ochocinco, my first impulse was obvious. Given his inaccuracy in the red zone, Cutler surely would hit the wrong letters on his cell-phone keyboard and require spell check. It wasn't wise for the Bears quarterback to answer Ochocinco's cybertaunts, not when he's being soundly embarrassed by Kyle Orton -- Kyle Orton, ladies and gentlemen! -- in first-half returns on the NFL's biggest offseason trade.

Yet there was Cutler, firing back when he should have been (a) working on his flawed passing mechanics, (b) pleading with management to find better weapons and (c) studying game film to determine why he went 2-of-9 with a bad interception inside the Atlanta 20-yard-line in Sunday night's loss. This while Orton has been the model of efficiency and near-perfection for a Broncos team that is 6-0 under coach Josh McDaniels, the first-year revelation who dared to unload Cutler and misses him now about as much as an unflushable toilet. Considering the mounting evidence against him, didn't Cutler have something better to do than play Twitter tag with a troublemaker?

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NEW ORLEANS -- The players have started wearing T-shirts bearing the inscription, "SB44." It's not a Louisiana highway or some exotic local beer but the stated aspiration of the Saints, a franchise that has managed only eight winning seasons in more than four decades and long was known for humiliated fans who wore bags over their heads. One fan was a young Eli Manning, who was a baby when his father got beat up in his final seasons but later would venture to the Superdome with his brothers, Peyton and Cooper, to see the Saints get mauled.

These days, Manning is just the latest victim of a team that doesn't hesitate to think big, even when its pedigree suggests small, careful, quiet steps to a championship. The idea of the Saints reaching Super Bowl XLIV should have been the halftime theme of the House of Shock, a musical troupe that instead gave us a Michael Jackson Thriller compilation. But then, we never, ever should be shocked by the great Drew Brees, who played a mesmerizing game of pitch-and-catch with his numerous weapons Sunday and proved again that he's among the most electrifying quarterbacks the game has known.

MINNEAPOLIS -- So here comes the folk hero once more, teasing when he should be wheezing, charming when he should be farming, reminding us again why we really, really want to love him. Anyone who had buried Brett Favre as a mercurial mope -- and who hadn't, other than friends, family and John Madden? -- was left to shut the hell up Monday night and nod admiringly at another inspirational portrait on a canvas unlike any other.

NEW ORLEANS -- You still slip-slide into a surreal daze upon entering the Superdome, recalling the horror it symbolized amid the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. No human being forgets how this "shelter of last resort'' reeked of stench from 30,000 refugees who had precious little water and food, how they reportedly were subjected to rape, violence, gang activity, drug dealing and the sight of a man committing suicide by jumping from the upper deck. But ever so quickly, the new excitement inside the Dome sweeps you right out of the past.

Refurbished and alive now, it's nothing but a den of delight in a city that still needs daily doses of hope and heart.

This is the home of Drew Brees and the Saints, a franchise once so awful that fans wore paper bags over their heads, but is suddenly resembling a team that could win a Super Bowl. Despair in the mushroom-shaped building has been replaced by raw delirium, an aura centered around a prolific and oddly underhyped quarterback, who has warmly embraced the city's recovery efforts and might not stop proving his former team, the Chargers, wrong until he reaches the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

PHILADELPHIA -- If there never will be a proper time to forgive Michael Vick, it does seem we've arrived at the junction of Grudging Acceptance Avenue and Second Chance Street. That would be the address of Lincoln Financial Field, where just a small cluster of 15 protesters -- carrying signs that read "NATIONAL FELON LEAGUE" and "VICK IS SICK" -- gathered in the drizzle before the presumably reformed dogkiller's first regular-season game in 33 months. And they didn't make nearly as much noise as those taunting and shouting them down.

I am at a newsstand, staring at the cover of a gossip magazine. On it is a photo of Jessica Simpson, lamenting the breakup of her relationship with Tony Romo and gushing that she wants him back. Except the cover refers to him simply as "Tony,'' which is absurd in that it assumes "Tony'' is a major figure in Americana when, in fact, he's an erratic and overhyped quarterback who might be benched before you can say Daisy Dukes.

CHICAGO -- Words aren't necessary. The images alone Sunday are sufficient portraits of why football might be the ultimate gratification mind game. There was Jay Cutler, managing a rare laugh as an official accidentally knocked his helmet off his head, punching the air in victory after a hellish week in which he threw four interceptions and was crucified again by the NFL coaching establishment. There was Robbie Gould, as in gold, calmly making yet another game-winning field goal in a volatile meteorological swirl on a cow-pasture surface pockmarked by two U2 concerts.

And there, on the Pittsburgh sideline, was Jeff Reed, literally looking ready to cry. Few professions in sports, or life, are more thankless than that of the placekicker. When you convert a kick, it's taken for granted. When you miss a potential winner, you're a bum. Reed, whose 82.8 percent conversion rate makes him the league's 10th-most accurate kicker ever, missed two such biggies on the oversized Brillo pad that is Soldier Field. And with those blunders came the first loss of the season for the Steelers, your defending Super Bowl champions, who might have begun to make their case for repeating if even one of Reed's kicks hadn't swerved wide left.

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GREEN BAY, Wis. -- So now, already, we are left to wonder if the biggest curse in professional football has swallowed Jay Cutler. He was supposed to be the savior of the Chicago Bears and still might be in due time, but in his first regular-season game Sunday night, he plummeted into the same black hole that has doomed so many of the franchise's wickedly bad quarterbacks.

Um, what in the name of Chad Hutchinson was he trying to do in the second quarter, when he floated a wayward pass to nobody in particular that was intercepted by Green Bay's Tramon Williams and returned 67 yards to the Bears 1? What in the name of Henry Burris was he doing just before then, when he tried a shovel pass to Matt Forte that entered the personal space of 325-pound Johnny Jolly, who couldn't have dropped the ball if it were covered in grease? What in the name of Peter Tom Willis was Cutler doing in the first quarter, when his wayward toss became the property of opposing safety Nick Collins?

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CLEVELAND -- If we grew nauseous over his annoying do-si-dos, his semi-psychotic flip-flopping between retirement and limbo and unretirement, now we're finally starting to get it. Why wouldn't Brett Favre want to come back, take $12 million this year, hand the ball to Adrian Peterson and have an all-access pass to one of the most delightful running backs of this or any other era?

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