The Ultimate Fantasy Fix: Let Packer Shareholders and Season Tix Owners Vote

Estimates place the number of fantasy football players anywhere from 14 to 30 million people, or more or less, depending on which stat collector you believe.

What we do know is millions of folks love to get together, whether in person or online, to play general manager and draft a football team.

In the Green Bay Packers, and the Brett Favre drama, we have a football fantasy situation in the making in which people could actually make a real decision impacting a real football team.

The team has 112,015 shareholders who hold a total of 4.75 million shares, according to the team's official website Packers.com. Team corporation rules prohibit anyone from owning more than 200,000 shares and one cannot buy shares in the team at this time.

Imagine the interest, the history, the sheer joy of it if the Packer organization decided to create the ultimate fantasy team by allowing the shareholders and season ticket holders to vote on whether Brett Favre or Aaron Rodgers should be the team's starting quarterback in 2008!

Are you kidding me? A fantasy team in which it isn't all fantasy! A team in which the fans decided on the starting quarterback and would have to live with their decision because they made it! A vote for shareholders to bring back their belowed quarterback if they want to do so.

How cool would it be to actually have a team in which the fans get to vote on the starting quarterback (and, of course, the resultant salary cap implications, etc., etc.) Oh, be still my heart.......!

Folks might argue the logistics would be impossible. How do you count the votes? Well, the same way in which shareholders, like me, get their annual shareholder packet, including tickets, every year.  We get our ticket to vote, a password and/or number to vote online or in person at designated locations, and vote!

This could work. We shareholders could actually be voting in our fantasy quarterback. We could be impacting the team and we would be even more involved in our team. Imagine how exciting it would be to be allowed to determine whether Favre comes back to play for the Packers this year!

But don't stop at giving us the vote for the starting QB this year, Packers. Start working with the NFL now on a future stock sale, let's say at $1,000 a share, limited to one share per person and current stock holders, and allow all stock holders to vote on future team issues, such as whether to retain Ted Thompson as GM or whether to buy property around Lambeau Field for future economic endeavors.

Each year the executive committee and a committee of shareholders could decide on a question (whether player-related or future property development or whatever) to submit for shareholder votes.

In time, as development and maturation of a true fantasy football team develops, and as technology develops, the Green Bay Packers could be the ultimate fantasy football team because it would actually be controlled by stockholders/fantasy football team owners playing for real.

For this year, please let us vote on whether to keep Favre. (And despite what I have written in previous articles, I would vote for Favre because he is the most give-it-all athlete I've ever seen and I've seen all but one game Favre ever played in a Packer uniform, including preseason.)

To the Packer organization: please give us the ultimate experience any fan of any professional sports team has ever had. Let us vote whether we want Favre back.