BEIJING – Here is how big Brett Favre is: We are 12 hours ahead of you here, and there are thousands of athletes representing dozens of nations and there is swimming on the horizon and basketball around the corner and all kinds of track and all kinds of field looming.
And yet Brett Favre has been the talk of the Games, at least among the English-speaking blokes, the curious from Australia and the bemused from England. On the bus this morning, a reporter from Scotland asked, “Is he really worth all the trouble?”
Well, let’s hope so.
SERBY: BROADWAY BRETT HAS GREAT SOUND
GREENBERG: FAVRE TOO LITTLE, FAVRE TOO LATE FOR JETS
Good for the Jets for getting this done, for putting themselves in play, for making themselves relevant again at a time when New York City is more of a Big Blue Giants Playpen than ever before, going back to Huff and Giff and Chuckin’ Charley. The Jets? They were more than the other team before this.
They were the Other Team, capital letters.
Threatening to be the OTHER TEAM, all caps.
The championship banner still waves in Jersey, and that’s something the Jets are going to have to deal with in their dying hours on Long Island.
But now they have a fighting chance. Now they get a Hall of Fame arm and a larger-than-life personality, and though it will be sad to see Chad Pennington go to Kansas City or wherever, it is a move that puts the Jets in front of the crowded team photo of New York teams again.
FAVRE JOINING UP WITH GANG GREEN
COMPLETE TANNENBAUM TRANSCRIPT
REPORT: SPECIFICS OF THE TRADE
Favre alone guarantees them nothing, not coming off 4-12, not with the Patriots still looming like impending doom at the top of the AFC East, not with those 38-year old bones of his. We know all too well the way these things go sometimes in football.
For every Joe Montana, who switched jerseys late in life and wound up leading the Chiefs to the AFC Championship Game, there is a Johnny Unitas, looking positively putrid in his powder-blue Chargers jersey, finding how hard it was to be Johnny U when you spend half the game flat on your back.
Doesn’t matter. Favre is a Jet now, and Jets fans will deal in possibilities instead of certainties and be glad to do it.
Finally, all these years later, there is a worthy successor to Joe Namath in style as well as substance. Finally, after a lineage of Richard Todd to Ken O’Brien to Boomer Esiason to Vinny Testaverde to Pennington – all of them fine quarterbacks, all of whom had their moments as Jets – there is another star to fill those white shoes.
Broadway Brett?
We’ll see about that. For now, for this season, for next season, the Jets are interesting again. It was the right thing to do, the right thing for this franchise, the highest-profile trigger that the Tannenbaum/Mangini Administration has dared to pull. Will it land them in the Super Bowl? Who ever really knows about that? Would you have picked the Giants to go there last August?
Does it matter? For too long, Jets fans have waited for something this bold, this exciting, this off-the-hook and over-the-top. Good for the Jets. Good for New York. And good for Favre.
He already rescued one sickly-green franchise from the morbid miasma of mediocrity. Can he do it again?
It’ll be fun watching him try.