The easy line is that the Packers added injury to insult when Brett Favre went down with an elbow boo-boo. But the injury almost caused another injury! Assistant trainer Kurt Fielding, who was charged with driving Favre to the locker room in a golf cart, had it floored and nearly decapitated Green Bay's QB when he plowed straight at cameramen and the tangled cables that attach to them. Then, in a race to get Favre to the tunnel first, the driver blasted past the goal post where Patriot players were heading in for halftime, nearly taking one New Englander out!

Mike McCarthy took full responsibility for the shutout loss, calling it a poor performance and unacceptable. He said he wouldn't "blow up" at the team, because they all knew what they did wrong.

OK, so Marquette retires jerseys and not numbers. So, let's see some freshman next season sport Dwyane Wade's No. 3 on the court. There's a way out of this, and the Packers have the right idea. They only retire a handful of NUMBERS, but have inducted several NAMES into their ring of honor. That's how you handle this stuff, so you don't run out of numbers, for one, and so that you really set the great ones apart from the rest of the lot. George Thompson was a great one, and deserves his number retired, not just his bumble bee jersey.

The Badgers learned a lesson… never schedule non-conference dogs at the end of the season, unless it's on the road, at Hawaii. The Buffalo game had no feel, was sloppy, and players looked they were just going through the motions to get by unscathed. We get enough of these bad matchups to start the season, and even the students showed disinterest by not filling up their section of Camp Randall Stadium.

Nuggets from the WIAA State Football Championships in Madison…several Badgers made sideline visits to catch their old high schools in action, including Nick Hayden and Tyler Donovan for Arrowhead, Zach Hampton for Stratford, who was watching his brother, Adam, win a fourth straight title for the Tigers, along with Joe Thomas and Eric Strickland for Brookfield Central Stickland told me he had 20 minutes to prepare for his first collegiate start at Iowa, and that was good… Brewers pitching coach Mike Maddux was on the Arrowhead sidelines while his daughter took in the game from the stands…Deerfield players help local farmers harvest tobacco when the leaves are ready for picking in August...Gilman won it's second state title in 2006, with the last one coming in 1986, when the Pirates head coach, Robin Rosemeyer, was a player… The number on the bus that brought them to Madison? 8606… Homestead head coach Dave Keel must be superstitious or something, because he didn't want to do his FSN halftime
Q & A quickie at midfield on the Badgers "W" because he said "that's for the players." We moved to the sidelines per Dave's request and he went on to shut out Arrowhead, 35-0… The head coach on the losing end of that score, Tom Taraska, was anything but grumpy during his halftime chat, giving props to the steam engine that was Homestead, and pointing out that there are worse places to finish a football season than Camp Randall.

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