Lucky for Favre he never was Bears' QB

Naturally, the Bears' only good quarterback news involves another team.

Call it the ultimate addition by subtraction -- Brett Favre retired from the Packers on Tuesday.

Celebrate! Celebrate! Dance to the music! If the Bears can't get better, their best bet is Green Bay getting worse.

Never mind that Packers quarterback heir Aaron Rodgers probably is better than either Rex Grossman or Kyle Orton.

Rodgers doesn't figure to ever crack my list of best Super Bowl-era QBs: 1. John Elway; 2. Favre. 3. Joe Montana; 4. Tom Brady; 5. Peyton Manning; 6. Terry Bradshaw; 7. Dan Marino; 8. Troy Aikman; 9. Jim Kelly; 10. Steve Young.

If Favre directed the Packers to last season's Super Bowl, he might be No. 1. As it is, he is No. 2 for now (until Brady and Manning move up) and most entertaining forever.

Anyway, I come today not to praise Favre but to use him as another excuse to bemoan my quarterback envy.

The tendency here the past 16 seasons was to wonder how different history would have been if the Bears, instead of the Packers, were smart enough to acquire Favre from the Falcons.

The Bears would have dominated the division … they would have been championship contenders nearly every year … they would have won another Super Bowl…

Yeah, right, and Eddie Murphy would have won an Oscar for "Norbit."

More likely, Favre would have been selling used cars back in Mississippi within a couple of years, and the Bears still would have been selling quarterback follies.

Ron Wolf, the Green Bay general manager who traded for Favre, was a personnel genius. Mike Holmgren, the Packers head coach who developed Favre, is a quarterback guru.

The Bears? For too much of the 1990s they had Dave Wannstedt in multiple roles. He would have surrounded Favre with clowns to the left and jokers to the right.

So it is in the NFL. Some teams are destined to have a quality quarterback and, well, the Bears simply aren't.

Prior to Favre, Montana was the big one that got away. The Bears had a couple of chances to draft him. Instead they dallied long enough for the 49ers to take him.

Good for Montana. Bill Walsh coached him, knew more about offense than anybody in the NFL, and not coincidentally mentored Holmgren along the way.

Here, Montana never would have learned where the free safety was. His relatively frail body would have been broken in countless pieces. Within months he would have become a real-estate broker in Lake Forest.

Before Montana, the big regret was that the Bears lost a coin flip for Terry Bradshaw.

You think Bradshaw would have won four Super Bowls in the 1970s with the Bears? Heck, he might not have won four games.

Bradshaw would have become the next Bobby Douglass instead of the next Sid Luckman, would have never learned to spell "C-A-T" even if spotted the "C" and "T," and would have wound up selling sporting goods at Sears.

Seriously, can anyone even fantasize that Bradshaw, Montana and Favre would have become Hall of Famers as Bears?

Sorry, but when it comes to quarterbacks, the best we can hope for are cheap thrills like an opposing great retiring.

So congratulations to Brett Favre for a great career but most of all for never being a Bear.