Life After Favre: The Green Bay Packers and their Fans Usher in the Aaron Rodgers Era

Wisconsin native Phil Hanrahan moved from Los Angeles to Green Bay to chronicle the Packers 2008 football campaign, the first season in seventeen years without quarterback Brett Favre. He is there as new starting quarterback Aaron Rodgers begins what one football writer called “the toughest job in professional sports.” Immersing himself in the worlds of team and town, Hanrahan is reborn a full-blown cheesehead: living above Vince Lombardi’s first Packers office, observing training camp practices, attending the team’s annual shareholders meeting, interviewing players, tailgating in arctic cold, shoveling snow at Lambeau for $8 an hour, celebrating Packer great Fuzzy Thurston’s 75th birthday at Thurston’s bar, and, at every turn, befriending scores of die-hard Packers fans he encounters along the way.

Hanrahan also journeys far from Lambeau as well, hitting away games in New Orleans and Minneapolis and pursuing adventures in Packer Land nation-wide, from a year-round Packers bar in Scottsdale, AZ, to wide receiver Jordy Nelson’s parents’ sports bar in rural Kansas, to tiny Napoleonville, LA, hometown of cornerback Tramon Williams.

Here is the first book written on the new-era Packers, the team of Rodgers, Coach Mike McCarthy, GM Ted Thompson. Featuring a new afterword that brings the Packers story up-to-date and covers their amazing triumph in Super Bowl XLV, Life After Favre chronicles one of the most dramatic seasons in Packers history while revealing, with energy, insight, and humor, the story of the NFL’s winningest franchise.