The Handover Scale

Aaron Rodgers gets to take over from Brett Favre. Where on this list of successions do you think this change will be?

1 - Turning Gold into Lead
Bo and Luke to Coy and Vance
During a contract holdout we were treated to a season of the Duke boys’ incestuous cousins who couldn’t even manage a believable Southern accent. This is the equivalent of replacing Crockett and Tubbs with a random Baldwin and Wayans brother and pretending it’s the same series. Not even slapping Daisy Duke in assless chaps could save the series after these two arrived.

2 - Small Feet, Big Shoes
Barney Fife to ???
It's not just anybody who could follow up Don Knotts; specifically, not the poor bastard who took over deputy duty on The Andy Griffith Show. And did it really matter what he did? The fact was, he wasn't Barney. Case closed.

3 - Set Up for Success, Fail Anyways
Ronald Reagan to GHW Bush
If Reagan had a Tickle Me Elmo as his vice president, then Dukakis would have gotten swept instead of winning ten states. And Elmo might have made a better president, given that he wasn’t programmed to say “Read my lips: I’m a dumbass.”

4 - Expanding to Failure
Happy Days to Joanie Loves Chachi
The problem was nobody else did.

5 - Continuing the Tradition of Incompetence
Dennis Miller to Tony Kornheiser
This one’s kind of a push: Miller did an awful job and was voted worst sportscaster ever, and Kornheiser does so poorly you can hardly consider him a sportscaster at all. So this represents a “change in kind.”

6 - Careful What You Wish For
Valerie Harper to Sandy Duncan
Memo to all you fading stars out there: never threaten the producers, or they might kill your character off and replace you with Sandy Duncan. And Sandy Duncan is a hit machine.

7 - His Time Has Come
Drew Bledsoe to Anybody
The injury heard ‘round the NFL. In New England, Bledsoe lost his spot to future hall-of-famer Tom Brady. Then, just to prove it wasn't a fluke, he went to Dallas and repeated the cycle with Tony Romo. He should get hired by NFL teams just to make their backup QBs perform better after his feet of clay lead to the inevitable injury.

8 - From Amateur to Professional
Lenin to Stalin
If you’re gonna go commie, you need to have massive purges. In this respect, Stalin is a huge step up from Lenin, who was essentially a pussy when it came to slaughtering his own people. Lenin constrained his murderous impulses to royals, while Stalin was willing to purge from intelligentsia on down to proletariat in order to keep his iron grip on power.

9 - A New Direction
Batman to Batman: The Dark Knight
Listen, I was a big fan of Adam West and the Battoossie. But we can all admit that Batman had become dorky and unhip. Until he got reimagined and started kicking some serious ass, what with tossing the Joker off the Empire State Building and all. Now people seriously think he could take Superman in a fistfight (as if!).

10 - The Faces Change, the Results Stay the Same
Montana to Young
The “Gold Standard” of QB changeoves, from one hall-of-famer to another. Of course, the second guy had to retire after numerous concussions and still doesn’t quite make sense when he talks. Just a little something for Rodgers to keep in mind...