Packers receiver Donald Driver has won his first career Super Bowl. And as he climbs the list of all-time franchise receiving records, he’s thinking about another goal.
The Hall of Fame.
Receiver Tim Brown, who played in a Super Bowl but never won one, planted the thought of a championship equating to Hall of Fame consideration into Driver’s head before the Packers beat the Steelers in early February.
“He sat down and said, ‘If you win a Super Bowl come Sunday, they will have to look at you as a candidate for the Hall of Fame,’” Driver said of Brown at his charity softball game Sunday, per Kareem Copeland of the Green Bay Press-Gazette. “For him to say that, that was something that made me dream about it even more. … When Tim Brown tells you they have to look at me as being a candidate, I shook my head that night and said all I have to do is win the Super Bowl and maybe I’ll get the opportunity to maybe one day be there.
“Will that dream ever come true? I don’t know. I hope it will. For me, that’s a goal. . . . It was never a goal early in my career. But when you get to winding down and you feel you’ve done a lot, not just for the organization, but for the community, that should stand for something. To me, that’s all that matters.”
Far more realistic is Driver’s goal of passing James Lofton as the all-time franchise leader in receiving yards. Lofton holds the record with 9,656 yards; Driver needs only 40 to match him.
Driver also needs only 12 touchdown receptions to match Sterling Sharpe with 65. Catching Don Hutson’s 99 touchdown catches likely is out of the question.
What could help Driver’s Canton cause even more than numbers would be more Super Bowls. With the Packers loaded on both sides of the ball and poised to compete for the foreseeable future, membership on, say, the first time to win three championships in a row would deliver plenty of cheesehead-wearing bronze busts to the Hall of Fame.
We know that talk of three in a row is extremely premature. But with the Packers one of the favorites to win it all again in 2011, who knows what will happen come 2012?
PFT wrote: