O.K., quick uniform check! He's Brett Favre and you're not.

	There's been no stopping Brett Favre this season.

Favre ultimately will enjoy an NFL legacy that goes well beyond this, but "Kept On Going Out There" no longer lines up as the worst place to begin. The man continues to start weekly at quarterback for the Packers despite all evidence that should suggest otherwise, and let's just go ahead with Exhibits A, B and C from last week alone.

Donovan McNabb, Tommy Maddox, Marc Bulger: Come on down, and sit right down. The one thing any self-respecting NFL team ought to plan for, over a 16-game season, is using its alternate quarterback way too often, in way too many unhappy situations, with a victory hanging in the balance.

You wonder why anyone would want to be an NFL quarterback. Oh, sure, there's the money, the glory and the fawning overhype, and ..., wait, we just answered the question.

Still, those Tom Brady stories only get you so far. Year in and year out, the smart money is on the team whose QB manages to stand up for most or all of its 16 games and postseason play, which helps to explain why somebody picks the Packers to run the table just about every year.

There's an interesting twist at work now involving lamed quarterbacks and the league's suffocating, galling, mediocrity inducing salary cap. (And when we say that, we mean, of course, the league's fabulous, table-leveling, parity inducing salary cap.) Under the traditional formula, the starting QB goes down and his team is left to scramble around with either an untested backup or a barely used one, a generally cheap backup who doesn't clog up the payroll. McNabb's injury in Philly fit that formula, with Eagles coach Andy Reid suddenly looking at Koy Detmer and wondering what part of his playbook he'll need to chuck.

But in Pittsburgh and St. Louis, the system is functioning from the inside out, albeit for markedly different reasons. Bulger, the top-rated passer in the NFC and 5-0 as a starter, will yield to Kurt Warner, the putative leader of the 0-4 Rams before injury sent him to the sideline a while back. And the Steelers are back to Kordell Stewart, who lost his job to 10-year veteran Maddox after a slow start.

Systems sometimes come into play here, although no one is sure exactly how. Clearly, though, what the Rams put together years ago was an offensive set so varied and potent that, like some of the West Coast variations of years gone by, any number of capable quarterbacks could come in and run it.

	After Marc Bulger went 5-0, there's been plenty of second-guessing Rams coach Mike Martz's decision to make Kurt Warner the starter this week.

It explains a small part of how Warner could have taken over for Trent Green a few years ago and made himself a star, just as it explains part of Bulger's success in place of Warner this fall. And, regardless of system, you get lightning in a bottle like that sometimes. A year ago, Brady was leading the Pats on what became a Super Bowl run. This year, Brady is good but not great, New England is 5-5, and nobody is talking about magic or destiny or any of it.

All this brings us, quite naturally, back to Brett Favre, if for no other reason than the man is a physical freak with (quite obviously) one of the all-time pain-tolerance levels, which often as not are what allow him to continue to suit up and play. And if we may be allowed to focus on individual achievement for a moment at the expense of a whole-team concept (you think they'll permit it?), Favre is the vanguard of a mini-roster of quarterbacks who, from time to time, probably should be applauded for just showing up.

Favre shows up. Rich Gannon in Oakland, about whom people ask each year what will happen when he breaks down physically, keeps going out there. Jeff Garcia in San Francisco hasn't missed a start in three years. Peyton Manning shows up a lot in Indy.

And we're already nearing the end of the list. Not only is there not much security in turn-of-the-century NFL quarterbacking, but longevity is almost completely out of the question. Frankly, there's a more extended career to be found in capable bench-warming, which reminds us that before taking over for Stewart last month, Maddox hadn't started an NFL game in 10 years.

Dunno if that gives the long-term edge to Cade McNown over his contemporaries. What it does suggest is a handful of growing truisms in the league: (1) A quality backup QB is gold; (2) A starting QB ought to enjoy his moment in the sun while he's there, because there's almost always a cloud about three feet away; and (3) When they fit Favre for his bust in Canton, "miraculous ability to take snaps" probably won't be the first sentence engraved.

Though maybe it should be.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com