Not even 24 hours after an announcement left on a reporter's voice mail, Brett Favre's sudden retirement already is under review.

Considering how he and his Packers played last season, he should have come back for another shot. Or at least that's the media backlash.

The Packers are young, they made the NFC Championship Game, Favre clearly loves to play, so why quit now?

Answer: Because he can — and should.

No sane man should attempt anything as difficult and dangerous as pro football if his heart isn't in it. First thing he does with that mind-set is try to be careful, which certainly is understandable.

Next thing he knows, he's looking through his earhole at a little man holding up fingers and asking him how many.

Favre explained that he still has the tools but lacks the will. Believe me, the latter quality is what separates most upper-tier athletes from the primates.

The moment you doubt, mortality creeps in. Don Meredith was only 31, but the interceptions and boos and big-game losses made up his mind for him.

"I tried to talk him out of it," Tom Landry said when asked why he didn't stop his quarterback. "But when you lose your desire in this game, that's it."

Landry probably didn't try as hard as he intimated. He knew because Meredith knew.

No pro athlete should feel bad about calling it quits. If you think it's time to go, it probably is.

Few superstars raised more eyebrows after retiring than Barry Sanders. He told the Lions in a letter, then flew to London by himself for a vacation before the club's 1999 training camp.

Sanders was only 31 and just two years removed from a season in which he ran for 2,053 yards.

Not until four years later did he reveal in his biography that he was "running on fumes" in the '97 season.

He was exhausted, tired of the game and the direction the organization had taken.

Could he have broken Walter Payton's career rushing record if he'd kept playing? If he'd stayed healthy, without question.

Had Sanders hung on, Emmitt Smith would have had to play a lot longer to break the rushing record.

But the record never consumed him.

As he so eloquently wrote, when it came to Payton's legacy, "I never valued it so much that I thought it was worth my dignity or Walter's dignity to pursue it amid so much media and marketing."

When we complain that an athlete should hang on, usually it's because we think of something they could have accomplished. More titles to win. More records to break.

But that's our problem, not theirs.

The book says you judge them by how many Super Bowls or titles they win, which explains how Otto Graham snuck in third place among Rick Gosselin's rankings of NFL quarterbacks.

With apologies to Goose, who knows more than a little about football, Otto played on some pretty good Cleveland teams. Let's see where he'd have ranked if he'd played for the Steelers in the 1950s.

Longevity and winning percentage are obvious traits to consider when it comes to quarterbacks, but here's a good way to judge them, too:

If you had to choose one to play for you, who would it be?

If it's one game, and I don't get a roster full of All-Stars to go with him, I'll take Joe Montana or John Elway or Brett Favre.

Favre won a Super Bowl. Even if he hadn't, he didn't have anything left to prove to anyone. The prospect of another title next season was no sure thing, either.

Bulletin: This isn't Otto Graham's NFL. The league can't pencil in its championship opponents before training camp.

Favre was luckier than most. He stayed 17 seasons, considered retiring at least a couple of years, gave it one last great run, then left with his head high and, more important, intact.

Here's to the rest of your life, Brett. You got out just in time.