Brett Favre And Company: the NFL's Five Best Acquisitions of 2009

Every offseason in the NFL, teams that seem just on the cusp of becoming great aggressively go after the players they feel will be the final piece of the puzzle; guys with singular talents who can turn a potential 10-6 team into a real contender.

At the very least, teams are always looking to make a splash by signing the guy they feel will help them make the leap to the next echelon of NFL clubs.

Before this season guys like Derrick Ward, T.J. Houshmandzadeh, Terrell Owens, and Jay Cutler all had that vibe of being poised for big things with their new digs.

Yet after eight weeks of regular season play, things haven't worked out quite as well for those guys.

On the flip side, many acquisitions that may have seemed solid, but not great at the time, have paid huge dividends for clubs.

It really is a tough old league.

With that, let's look at what I view as the five most important acquisitions of this past offseason and the way they've helped their clubs through these first games.

5. Gregg Williams/Darren Sharper/Jabari Greer, New Orleans Saints

This is a tough one for me because to my eyes, defensive football, more than any other phase of the game, requires the combined efforts of eleven different men to be successful.

Have the Saints been a great defense this year? Not entirely.

But they're much better than last year and already have won games on the back of their defensive effort, largely due to the work of these three new faces.

Gregg Williams was viewed by many pundits, myself included, as a poor fit for New Orleans because his hyper-aggressive "kill anything that moves" style of defense simply didn't fit the personnel that New Orleans had on the roster.

With the addition of safety Darren Sharper and cornerback Jabari Greer, that style of defense has become a possibility for New Orleans.

Sharper has already pulled down a mind-blowing seven interceptions while also playing solid in coverage and coming up against the run. Like other ball-hawk safeties in the league, he's making teams fear throwing in his direction, although as a safety he's harder to avoid. 

With Sharper's contributions the Saints have already caught more interceptions through seven games (16) than they did all of last season (15).

Greer, on the other hand, seems to have the ball thrown at him constantly.

Among corners in for at least 75 percent of their team's defensive snaps, nobody has held quarterbacks to a lower rating than Greer. In the 56 throws sent his way, or into his zone, Greer has only allowed a single touchdown all year.

If not for the contributions of these three guys and what they've done to help the New Orleans pass defense, the Saints could kiss hopes of a perfect season goodbye.

4. Tully Banta-Cain, New England Patriots

News reports emerged not too long ago that indicated that Tully Banta-Cain had been cut right before the trade deadline.

To put it lightly, people were mystified.

Wasn't this the guy who the Patriots had brought back from San Francisco after he began his career in Foxboro?

Wasn't this the guy tied for the team lead in sacks? The only real pass-rushing presence on the field?

Wasn't this the guy Derrick Burgess was supposed to be?

It was. And the Patriots had released him only so they could re-sign him to a long-term deal mere weeks into the regular season.

Whatever it was that Tully Banta-Cain didn't have in New England and what San Francisco didn't see developing, the Patriots spotted it early.

The Patriots don't make moves until absolutely necessary. Just ask Vince Wilfork.

That they went and got a deal done as soon as possible, rather than wait until after the season when multiple teams might go for Banta-Cain, says a lot about what he's done this year in games and in practice.

Now, Banta-Cain is only one of a number of acquisitions on New England's "way better than expected" 2009 defense.

Leigh Bodden, Shawn Springs, Brandon McGowan, the aforementioned Derrick Burgess, and Banta-Cain were all brought in to help revamp a defense that had gotten too old and too slow way too quick.

Now, the Patriots have yet to really play much in the way of talent offensively, but they shut out both Tampa Bay and Tennessee while also throwing a spanner in the works of Atlanta's offense.

A lot of that is due to the guys not named Banta-Cain, as well as the old vets like Ty Warren and Vince Wilfork.

But with injuries mounting and Burgess largely inactive, Banta-Cain has been the one true pass-rush threat the Patriots have.

As I said before, defensive football requires a real team effort. If you're missing one piece, you can have Night Train Lane out there and you're going to get thrown on.

Banta-Cain is one of those pieces.

3. Rex Ryan, New York Jets

Sometimes it's all about attitude.

With Rex, and the whole Ryan family, that's certainly the case. The Jets have been a floundering team for much of this decade. Not always terrible, never really good enough to emerge from New England's shadow.

You could always sense that they had the talent, but there was beginning to be this sense of malaise that just crept into that locker room every year as they sputtered to respectable, but not elite, finishes.

This year, Ryan brought a swagger to the team that, despite a tough stretch of losses to some very solid teams, hasn't dissipated.

The Jets have a tough schedule. They always had a tough schedule, but many people ignored it after their hot start. I wouldn't make the same mistake of ignoring the contributions of the Jets' new head coach.

But their win over New England, though it was before Tom Brady's reckoning or whatever you want to call it against the Titans, was a legitimate win.

Ryan out-coached Belichick, his players outplayed the New England's, and his team steamrolled the Patriots, their biggest divisional obstacle this year.

I'm not a huge believer in the intangibles that a person brings. Chemistry rarely seems to mean much in an NFL locker room unless there's a real poison pill and that only seems to rear its head when teams are losing.

In the NFL, it doesn't matter anyway. Losing with guys you like and losing with guys you hate is still losing.

But Ryan has brought tangible benefits as well. First, he aggressively went after Bart Scott, whom he coached with Baltimore. Bart Scott, to my eyes, was the prize of last year's free agent class and Ryan wooed him expertly to bring him to New York.

Scott hasn't had a perfect season, but he's a piece you can build around in New York and Ryan's the reason he's there.

Beyond that, Ryan's fun to play for and he's beginning to gain a reputation as a coach that is going places.

For the Jets, I'd say they'd consider it money well spent.

2. Kyle Orton, Denver Broncos

Did anybody think that Chicago got the short end of the deal here when they made the move to acquire the ever-petulant Jay Cutler before the season?

But through seven games it's the Broncos who are laughing with a 6-1 record and the inside lane to a division title.

It would be easy to say that Orton has continued to manage games, to work within the confines of McDaniels' system to achieve success that, coupled with their superb defensive effort, has led to wins.

That's the general consensus, I feel. It's also wrong.

Orton hasn't blown the doors off the joint, true, but he's also been more than a mere game manager.

A more apt word would be "clinical." Orton seems to have lost the happy feet that always seemed to show up at the worst time in Chicago.

He plays with a sort of ease now as he seems to see the field better, avoiding the costly mistakes that derailed his career previously.

This year he's thrown only a single interception and has dropped his interception/attempt percentage from an ugly 2.6 to 0.4 percent, best in the league.

He's done that, though, by also occasionally allowing the ball to fly. It's easy to not throw interceptions in the NFL. It really is. But by not taking risks you simply aren't going to win football games.

Every now and then, you have to try and fit a ball into a space that seems too small. You have to try and float it over that linebacker to your receiver streaking across the middle.

You have to take risks. Orton has done that.

The Broncos took big risks by going after a rookie head coach and shipping their franchise quarterback out the door.

So far, those risks have paid off.

1. Brett Favre, Minnesota Vikings

Let's face it, this team wouldn't be 7-1 with Tarvaris Jackson.

Put me among those who think that Jackson actually could be a very serviceable quarterback somewhere, but not to the level that Minnesota needed this season.

The Vikings are a test case in alchemy.

Throw a bunch of ingredients together, boil in media attention and criticism, hope it doesn't all explode, and pray you can turn a team that seems ohsoclose into a real title contender.

It has been largely done on the backs of guys the Vikings have brought in the last couple years, as well.

Adrian Peterson, Percy Harvin, Bernard Berrian, Jared Allen...and now, Brett Favre.

Favre is not a long-term solution. That much is obvious. But the Vikings aren't thinking long-term. They knew they had a defense that could win a Super Bowl.

They knew they had an offensive line and a running game that could win a Super Bowl.

What they didn't have was a guy who could come in and make plays when necessary and avoid mistakes whenever possible.

So far, that's the Brett Favre they've gotten.

The key to this team is going to be health and home-field advantage. Right now, Brett is enjoying a career renaissance and it has to, at least in some small part, be attributed to the fact he's in a dome again.

The last half-decade we've watched as Brett struggled in cold weather down the stretch.

If the Vikings keep winning, that won't really be a problem.

And after the season is all over, after a king's ransom for a former rival QB in his 40's, and, perhaps, after a Super Bowl trophy, the Vikings will know they made the boldest move and it paid off in a big way.