Jared Allen Told Brett Favre To Stay Retired In 2010

We all remember the story from the 2010 offseason about how Steve Hutchinson, Ryan Longwell, and Jared Allen all went down to Hattiesburg, Mississippi to try to convince quarterback Brett Favre to return to the Minnesota Vikings for one more run. Now, with Favre scheduled to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame here in a few weeks, we've gotten another story about that trip.

As it turns out, only two of those three players were trying to convince Favre to return. While Hutchinson and Longwell were trying to talk him into coming back, Allen was attempting to convince Favre to stay retired. He related the story on the Hawkcast, a podcast featuring Cincinnati Bengals linebacker A.J. Hawk.

According to Ben Goessling of ESPN, Longwell confirmed Allen's version of the events.

And if anyone thought that perhaps Allen was joking -- he does tell Hawk at one point that he was simply using the trip "to get out of training camp for a few days" -- or engaging in some revisionist history, he wasn't, according to Longwell, who for 11 of his 15 NFL seasons was teammates with Favre (nine in Green Bay, two in Minnesota).

"There was a lot said between the four of us in those 16 hours that we were down there," Longwell said in a text message Friday. "That was for sure one of the subjects that came up. [It's] 100 percent true."

Who knows how much differently the 2010 season. . .which turned out to be a disaster on nearly every level. . .would have turned out without Favre's final comeback, or how it would have affected the direction of the franchise as a whole. But we now know that one of the best Vikings of recent times was attempting to get Brett Favre to stay at home rather than come back for what would have been his final season.