The Bachelor-Bret

There are two things I know for certain at the moment. One is that I probably watch The Bachelorette more than most guys do. The second is that I'm sick of Brett Favre and the dramatic life he leads. So I'm going to do my best to tackle a comparison between the show I'm often forced to watch and my least favorite Mississippi athlete.

First, let's take a look at the TV phenomenon that is The Bachelor/Bachelorette. An eligible single man or woman is put on a show and asked to choose a potential partner from over twenty or more members of the opposite sex. This person is not obligated to marry the chosen one right away, but of course the title leads those watching (primarily single women between 13 and 78 and a pathetic unemployed blogger) to believe the winner and the star will live happily ever after. I know from tabloids at the grocery store that very few of these shows have ended in true love, but hey, who's to blame a guy for believing in fairy tales?

Any who, in the weeks that the competition takes place, the star of the show can take his or her suitors anywhere in the world and can do any number of things with certain individuals or small groups of those fighting for his or her love. I've really never watched any seasons of either show with any regularity until this summer's edition of The Bachelorette, but this season, Jillian and her boys have visited Vancouver and next week head to Whistler, Canada. Yeah... Canada, eh?

Good ole Jill is kind of like the Shania Twain of reality TV, kind of cute, very Canadian, but ultimately annoying and bitter about her past. You see she was jilted last season (I think.) on The Bachelor and since one guy didn't pick her out of thirty fine females, she feels she deserves to have her pick of thirty guys with more product in their hair than every person who has ever played Danny Zuko combined. Emphasis on ever.

So you might be asking, "Warn-dog. What's the big deal about a girl trying to find true love?" And my answer is, "Nothing. You just don't need a flipping TV show to do it. And if it's taken you two TV shows to do it, there is something very wrong with you."

I have no problem with entertaining TV, but this Jillian babe, a cute girl who could use a little rhinoplasty, is just a lost cause. She's had two full television seasons of limelight and I'm just ready for her fifteen minutes to be done. It appears that she loved the bachelor but couldn't land him and now is watching as what appear to be relatively decent, albeit greasy guys fight over her. These guys could be out there fulfilling the role of knight in shining armor to one of the girls lounging on the couch every Monday night longing for true love, but Jillian is just too selfish (perhaps incapable) of finding love without the help of a television show. So she plays coy and precious to these men while she leads them on. And when I say lead on, I mean sleeps with them all. And when I say sleeps with them all, I mean practically in front of the others' faces. Kind of twisted if you ask me.

But true love is true love. Who am I to stand in the way? Maybe after she marries and divorces one of these guys, I can be cast as the guy that's almost too old for "Jillian: The Cougar." You never know. Keep any eye peeled in five to ten years for that.

So The Bachelorette, Brett Favre, what the hell do they have to do with one another? She's from a place where people talk funny, Vancouver; he's from a place where people talk funny, Hattiesburg, MS. She's not very smart; he's been hit in the head a lot, therefore also not very smart. But the one thing that binds them together more than all of these are that they are cheating the rest of the world by taking its opportunities.

Brett Favre has been playing mind games with the NFL and all of its fans for the past several years. Retire? Come back? Who knows? But at this point everyone is growing tired of all the hoopla. The guy has played for nineteen years. He's won a Super Bowl. He holds most every QB record. He has millions of dollars and wicked sweet Wrangler Jean commercials. It's time to move on. The longer he sticks around, the more he tarnishes his own image. If he had retired two years ago after leading the Packers, the team he will forever be known for leading, to an incredible season, everyone would remember him as a hero. But all of this indecision just tends to piss people off. And it makes Sportscenter really terrible.

I understand it's probably hard to walk away from something you love so much, but there has to come a point where you understand it's time to let other people take over for you; it's time to give others a chance.

So here we have where Brett Favre and the Bachelorette come together like two really terrible puzzle pieces. One hogs the attention of the NFL while younger quarterbacks sit and wait for their turns. By the time he retires, his backups for his various teams will either have been traded or begun successful careers as car dealers, insurance salesman, or high school coaches. And Brett will never have thought twice about ruining any chances they would have ever had at making it big. The New York Jets kicked Chad Pennington to the curb without thinking twice to obtain Mr. Favre and what did he do in Miami? He led them to the playoffs after a dismal previous season. Aaron Rogers put up a heck of a fight in Green Bay after Favre left. But these are just two cases. Other guys deserve their shot at calling the plays, but with Brett Favre still in the picture, things look grim for the guys sitting behind Favre in the depth charts. So I hope he does these guys the favor of hanging it up so they can show their stuff.

It's way too late for people to look past this retire, not retire stuff. His reputation is shot. And that sucks, but that's what happens when you are too selfish to walk away while you are on top. Brett, take a lesson from Jerome Bettis and John Elway. It'd be a lot better for all involved if you did.

As for Jillian: She thinks so highly of herself that she believes she deserves to have guys fight over her on national TV. If you really think about the concept of the Bachelor (ette) long enough, you begin to feel sick, or at least I do. This woman has had two chances to find love on a show, but she just can't seem to get it right. Maybe it's because love isn't supposed to come via a reality show, but instead by natural attraction and organic means. So she takes away the chances these guys, contestants, whatever, have at finding normal love by leading them around on a leash that is television, messing with their heads and emotions, and then crushing all of them but one. And when that love doesn't work out, where will she turn? My guess is pornography of some sort, which in all seriousness is really sad. Hopefully these guys fighting over her won't be so screwed up by the whole experience that they can actually have a shot at living a normal life one day.

Brett, Jillian: please grow up. Thanks for entertaining us week in and week out, but it's time to do the right thing. Be normal. Understand that it's not all about you and that your decisions affect more than just yourselves. I hope that the people that follow your lives religiously don't feel like they have to be as selfish about their lives as you two are about yours.

Like assholes, everyone has an opinion. This is mine.