Favre Might Retire Today, Maybe, Probably Not

About 45 minutes ago, Pro Football Talk posted a doozy of a story (or rumor collection, as it were): Packers quarterback Brett Favre has called a press conference for 12:30 this afternoon in order to announce his retirement. Ah-ha! Got your attention with that one, didn't we? No? Well, OK, fine, so we're all kind of bored with Brett Favre.

But anyway, PFT is hedging its bets, to say the least.

As we write this one, we're trying hard not to pull one of those "Favre will retire, unless he doesn't" routines. Instead, our goal is merely to share the information that we currently have. This isn't a report that he will retire, and if he does retire we won't claim "as first reported on PFT". Our goal at this point is only to inform. So here's what we know — a response from one member of the organization to a direct question regarding whether Favre is calling it quits today did not have the "No way in hell!" or "I'm looking into this right now!" quality that would be expected upon hearing that The Franchise is walking away in the middle of training camp.

Hmm. That sounds like about the furthest thing from confirmation that we can think of, save for Favre picking up the phone himself and saying, "Dude, I'm just talking about my hamstring." But it's Favre, so you never know with him. The press conference is in 45 minutes. If Favre doesn't retire, we will make this solemn vow: We will never mention the words "Favre" and "retire" in the same sentence until the guy actually files papers. And even then, we'll probably need to see two forms of proper identification.

Favre Retiring Today? [Pro Football Talk]

(UPDATE: Ha. That didn't take long. PFT has already said the story is a "false alarm." Awesome.)

(SECOND UPDATE: Here's how the "scoop" ended up getting started.)