nfl records

Brett Favre can afford to be nonchalant about his latest record after passing John Elway to become the quarterback with the most wins in NFL history on Sunday.

The future Hall-of-Famer clinched his 149th win in a 35-13 triumph over new York Giants.

"Maybe one day down the road it will mean a lot," Favre said after throwing for 286 yards and three touchdowns. "But the most important game is the next game. I'm proud I've played in a lot of games."

Favre holds a dozen NFL records and is closing in on more.

Sunday's touchdowns have left him three shy of Dan Marino's all-time mark of 420, and if he manages to throw 20 this season, he will match Marino's achievement of throwing 20 or more TDs in 13 consecutive seasons.

Favre admitted that on the long list of achievements, the wins record would not be the one he treasured.

"They want to say I won that many... Great!" he said. "I'm receiving the game ball. I'm not going to turn it down. Since day one, when I was in the fifth grade, they gave out trophies for individual achievements.

"I think it's unfair that the quarterback gets labelled with wins and losses. Last week was a perfect example. I didn't do anything last week, and they gave me a win. I give it to the defense and special teams."

Favre would have a hard time making that case about Sunday's game, however.

While the defence certainly did its job in quieting Eli Manning, Favre was outstanding for Green Bay.

He picked apart the Giants' porous secondary, completing his first 14 passes of the second half as all his touchdowns came after half-time.

It was his 58th game with three or more touchdown passes.

"It looks like he's having fun and he had a heck of a game," said Packers head coach Mike McCarthy. "The all-time anything in this league is such a monumental achievement. 149 victories speak for itself."

McCarthy would certainly suggest Favre reassesses his view on the wins record.

"When you go out and win for a long period of time, I think that it is the ultimate compliment that a quarterback can have," he said. "If you ask me what is the biggest record he can achieve I think he just accomplished it."

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Sept. 14 ― Brett Favre is the most three-dimensional of N.F.L. players, a star quarterback with a personal life that has hit harder than any blitzing linebacker. He has been addicted to painkillers, struggled through alcohol and marriage problems, lost his father to a heart attack the day before a game, lost his brother-in-law in an accident a week before his wife was found to have breast cancer, had his childhood home in Mississippi destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and lost his father-in-law ― "I was as close to him as I was to my dad," he said ― to a heart attack this summer.

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Giants defensive end Michael Strahan set the single-season record with a controversial sack of Packers quarterback Brett Favre.

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Brett Favre, 37, has started 258 consecutive games and is on the verge of several records.


But there has been one constant: football.

For 258 consecutive games, dating to September 1992 and including the playoffs, Favre, 37, has started at quarterback for the Green Bay Packers. The streak seems in jeopardy mostly between seasons, not during them. For years, Favre has left the last game hinting that he may retire.

So far, he has always decided to come back. There remains comfort in football.

Michael Strahan knows the feeling. At 35, he seriously contemplated ending his career this summer.

"Most people, with their job, they probably are looking forward to being retired," Strahan said. "In a lot of ways, we do, too."

It is another thread to the bond forged between Favre and Strahan, linked largely in the collective football memory by Strahan's controversial sack of Favre in the final game of the 2001 regular season. Favre dropped to the ground before Strahan arrived, a play that gave Strahan the N.F.L. single-season record.

It was widely questioned at the time and remains an uncomfortable topic, and neither player wanted to talk about it again this week.

They are otherwise engaging and charismatic personalities, each headed toward the Pro Football Hall of Fame, capping careers with a single franchise stuck this season with middling expectations.

Their roles on the field are opposite ― one tries to avoid defensive ends, the other chases quarterbacks ― and they are not particularly close friends, but they have discovered the same difficulty in knowing when the time is right to quit.

To fans, the decision appears so black and white: If healthy and able, play. It is a child's game, rewarded with Monopoly money and unbound adulation.

But lives are shaded in countless grays, as Favre and Strahan have come to learn too well, and they have struggled during recent off-seasons trying to clearly color in their years after football.

Favre has painted football as a diversion from his string of foibles and personal sorrows. His father, Irv, died of a heart attack in December 2003, the day before the Packers were to play the Raiders in Oakland.

Favre stayed with his team, then threw four touchdown passes in a victory on "Monday Night Football."

"It is difficult, it has been difficult, it will continue to be," Favre said of his off-field hurdles during a conference call with reporters Wednesday.

"It is not your everyday job, and I am kind of able to engross myself in that and kind of get lost for those three hours, like I did with my dad."

Strahan is far less revealing about his personal life, but he is not without life-changing episodes of his own. He went through a bitter divorce in New Jersey last year and was ordered to pay his former wife $15.3 million.

The sordid details of the failed marriage were turned inside out during the proceedings, then spread widely through newspapers, leading Strahan to boycott the news media during training camp in 2006.

Strahan now makes his off-season home across the country in Southern California, and his gap-toothed smile and quick wit have forged a future in television. He skipped training camp this summer as he contemplated whether he wanted to continue playing. In the end, about a week before the regular season started, he, too, decided he would play.

Like Favre, he has shown few signs in recent years that his ability has slipped and, during games, no sign that the thrill is diminished.

"One thing about this job is being competitive," Strahan said. "And that's the hard part to give up, the competition of it. In a lot of other businesses, when you're done with that job, you probably can do a lot of other things to replace it.

"But there's nothing like competing, against another person or against another team, in front of 80,000 people."

Favre and Strahan are leaders of teams in transition. The Packers, under the second-year coach Mike McCarthy, are the N.F.L.'s youngest team, measured by average age. The Giants are the third youngest.

It is likely that their careers will end this year or next as most careers do, without a championship as a coda.

Like Strahan, Favre's concern about leaving the game is not so much about what lies ahead, but what is left behind.

"There's one day it's going to be over and you'll look back and go, heck, I'd love to even just play on a losing team just to play," Favre told The Associated Press this summer.

Until they decide that it is over, Favre will sling footballs and Strahan will chase quarterbacks. The final intersection of their careers could come Sunday in the Green Bay backfield. Strahan stands tied with the former linebacker Lawrence Taylor for the franchise lead in sacks, with 132 ?.

Favre, too, is on the verge of several records. He has 148 victories, tied with John Elway for the career lead among quarterbacks.

He is six touchdown passes from matching Dan Marino's N.F.L. record of 420, and could break Marino's marks in career pass attempts and yards this season.

"I would hope that I didn't have to break one record for people 30 years from now to remember me," Favre said during training camp.

And yet he seems destined to be remembered largely for his consecutive-games streak, an uncanny string of luck and grit, the longest among quarterbacks in league history.

For 15 years, Favre has been there for the Packers. And football has been there for him.