Notable retirements #3: Trent Green

Trent Green retired last week, putting the wraps on a 15-year career that included a Super Bowl championship and two Pro Bowls. Trent never should have come back in 2008, having suffered severe concussions in Kansas City in 2006 and in Miami in 2007. Rams Nation is grateful he's just getting off the field in one piece with all his faculties intact.

Trent returned to his hometown Rams for a last hurrah in 2008, but it was mostly raspberries for the veteran QB. He threw six INTs in three games, and in two of those games, he would have had a higher passer rating by spiking every pass into the ground. The nadir was a four-pick game in a 27-3 loss to the Bears.

But Green's place in Rams history was, and is, already secure, as the man who unofficially launched The Greatest Show on Earth. His big-ticket free agent signing here prior to the 1999 season set a new tone for the Rams front office, and in the 1999 preseason, Trent looked nigh unbeatable, running then-new offensive coordinator Mike Martz's offense at peak efficiency.

Then it hit. It, of course, being brutal cheap-shot artist Rodney Harrison, who leveled his specialty at Trent's knee in the third preseason game, ending the QB's season and apparently blowing up the Rams' 1999 season in the starting blocks.

But that, of course, led to the rise of Kurt Warner and an as-yet unparalleled offensive surge, along with two NFC championships and a Super Bowl title.

And I don't think the Rams win those Super Bowls with Trent Green behind center. He did have success in Kansas City after leaving St. Louis the first time, but he never had Warner's uncanny accuracy and was a rather mistake-prone QB. The Trent Green I saw play after 2000 never would have beaten Tampa to get the Rams into Super Bowl 34. He would've thrown a bunch of picks.

But that doesn't make Green's years here in St. Louis unsuccessful or unimportant. He helped a losing franchise adopt a new attitude. And when he came back healthy for the 2000 season, he had every justification in the world to shout that he wanted his starting QB spot back. He easily could have created a team-dividing QB controversy. It wouldn't be the first or last time a QB in Trent's position has done so.

But Trent didn't. He took his clipboard (and generous backup-QB paycheck) gracefully, didn't split the team, didn't snipe at anybody, and when called on to sub for Warner, did a decent, if slightly turnover-prone at times, job. The harmony at the team's most important position helped it on to a couple more years of outrageous, memory-making success.

We thank Warner, and Marshall Faulk, and Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt, and many, many others for those great seasons. But we shouldn't forget to thank Trent Green, limited though his on-field contributions here were. For Trent lived up to one of the great virtues of athletics.

He was a team player.