Brett Favre’s last name is spelled F-A-V-R-E. It’s pronounced, “Farv.”
Those two facts have nothing to do with each other. Yet, for decades, every broadcaster, every analyst, every color commentator who has ever sat behind a microphone and talked about professional football has said it exactly right without ever being asked to think about why. The spelling doesn’t help. The letters give you nothing. And still, somehow, the NFL media looked at F-A-V-R-E, said “Farv,” and never looked back.
Kyle Brandt brought that up on Good Morning Football this week, and the reason he brought it up is Travis Etienne.
Your name is sacred. Protect it and ask people to speak it properly. pic.twitter.com/Cn5lEGMXTz
— Kyle Brandt (@KyleBrandt) March 16, 2026
As we covered when Etienne made the revelation at his Saints introductory press conference, the running back spent years correcting people on his last name’s French pronunciation — closer to Achane than the way it has been said on broadcasts since his Clemson days — before eventually surrendering to the mispronunciation somewhere around his freshman year. He told people to say it how it looked, the broadcast world obliged, and the incorrect version calcified into something so familiar it became hard to even hear as wrong. It wasn’t until signing with the Saints in New Orleans, a city with deeper roots in French Creole culture than any other in the country, that Etienne felt comfortable trying to reclaim it.
Brandt’s point wasn’t that the media should be embarrassed about what happened. It was that none of it needed to happen at all. The NFL has been getting difficult names right for as long as there have been difficult names to get right — Ndamukong Suh, Younghoe Koo, Halapoulivaati Vaitai, Equanimeous St. Brown — because this is a league that reflects the full range of heritages, and the people covering it have always risen to meet that. Other sports do the same thing without making a production of it. Nobody stumbles over Novak Djokovic. Nobody gets Giannis Antetokounmpo wrong anymore. The names get said right because someone insisted on it early, and the industry followed.
“This is an evolving league where we talk about people of different heritages and backgrounds,” the NFL Network personality said. “We can do it.”
The same industry that absorbed Favre without a second thought spent years mispronouncing Etienne, and the reason it happened isn’t that Etienne failed to fight hard enough — it’s that he had to fight at all. He spent weeks in his freshman year at Clemson correcting people every single day, got nowhere, and eventually concluded it wasn’t worth the energy. Robbie Gould spent years being called Gould when it was actually Gold, and when he finally said something, it got corrected. Tyrod Taylor was called Ty-rod for the better part of his career when his name was always tuh-ROD.
“There’s a few things in life that you just, you’ve got to get right. ‘This is how you say my name,’ and the NFL media, we can handle it,” Brandt added.
In each case, a player had to spend meaningful time and effort just to be called by his own name, and in each case, the industry that covers the NFL for a living could have done the work itself. The football media is not incapable of learning, because it has proven that with names far more difficult than Etienne. The question Brandt was really asking is why the obligation to teach it falls so consistently on the person who has the most to lose by pushing back.
“I’m going to say Travis Achane Jr. because I respect you,” Brandt said, “and when you respect someone, you say their name right. I’m glad you told us. I just wish you would have told us earlier.”