BRETT Favre did the Jets a solid yesterday, did for the men who run the team what they apparently were never going to be able to do themselves: He saved them from themselves, from their delusions of what Favre could mean to them, and bring to them, as a 40-year-old quarterback in the NFL.
LEGEND TELLS JETS HE’S DONE…4-EVER
Woody Johnson made it plain from the moment this season was over that his man-crush on Favre hadn’t dissipated a bit from the summer – when, it is good to remember, he was joined in his puppy love by a large segment of New York’s green-tinted football clientele.
The difference is, Jets fans learned to fall out of love once they saw with their own eyes that the Favre wearing this shade of green in 2008 was only occasionally a reminder of the Favre who wore Packers green in 1998. You got the feeling Johnson would be willing to wait until next season’s bye week if that’s what it took for Favre to make up his mind.
Now, at last, the Jets can move on, they can move forward, they can do officially what they should have been doing all along. They already have hired a coach in Rex Ryan who, just about everyone agrees, is exactly what this paranoid franchise badly needed – a man with fresh ideas on football and an open-minded approach to changing the KGB atmosphere that has polluted the air for far too long around this organization.
Now, they can allow Ryan to truly be his own man, and his own coach. They can allow Ryan to identify who he believes the right quarterback is – for today and for the foreseeable future. This is what the Jets need to do now. They need to entrust and empower Ryan to make this decision, because as much as Ryan’s expertise may be attached to the defensive side of the ball, his long-term viability as a winning coach absolutely will be intertwined with the man who will guide the other side of the ball.
“If I’m a guy with a fresh slate, I want this to be like entering a marriage with a new quarterback,” a longtime NFL executive told me yesterday. “And I don’t mean a shotgun marriage, either. Someday, people in the league are going to realize Band-Aids can keep you from dying, but they can’t make you a champion. They never have.”
Going to a familiar, old pile of veterans is a Band-Aid. Favre was the ultimate Band-Aid. The Jets weren’t going to win a Super Bowl under Chad Pennington, wouldn’t have matched the 11 wins Pennington collected with the Dolphins and their soft-as-Charmin schedule, and so it is worth remembering that as cataclysmic as 2008 seemed to the Jets, all they really did was push the inevitable back a year.
They already were over Pennington (and never would have had to think twice about him if they’d just been smart enough to trade him out of their division) and were prepared to choose between Brett Ratliff and Kellen Clemens before Favre dropped out of the sky. Was it worth a shot? For Favre, and the lightning that everyone hoped still lived in his arm, it was.
It won’t be for Kerry Collins, or for Kurt Warner, or for any other grizzled veteran you can name. Ryan comes from Baltimore, which disproved (along with Atlanta) the long-held notion that you can’t learn to win while a kid quarterback learns to play, as long as it’s the right kid quarterback. Is that Clemens? Is that Ratliff? Is that navigating the draft, trying to snare someone like Mark Sanchez or Matt Stafford?
It’s on Mike Tannenbaum to let Ryan make that call, and it had better be the right one. But at least it will be the smart one, no matter whom the Jets pick. Finding a Favre Lite would be the opposite of smart. And the Jets too often have been the opposite of smart the last 40 or so years.