Here Come The Warm Jets: Favre Clarification

For most people I associate with, I'm one of if not the only Jets fan they know.

Which means that they've all been asking lately what I think of the Brett Favre trade. So I tell them.

That, of course, gets the follow up of, "What, are you nuts? How, as a Jets fan, can you not be excited?"

Allow me to explain.

First, allow me to qualify. I fully understand that as it seems right now, 38 year old Brett Favre is better than Chad Pennington, and better than Kellen Clemens. Meaning, I fully understand that having Favre on the team makes it more likely that the team will be better this year. If the equation is "better team" = "happy fan" then I seem to be mathematically eliminated from hating this deal.

There are a few mitigating factors to it, which should make it clearer why I still stand by my initial reaction of being filled with expletive-laden frustration.

1 - He is not our guy. Brett Favre is a Packer. He is the Jesus of Green Bay. He took a dead franchise and dead fan base and revived them both. Seeing these types of athletes on other teams always feels wrong; it feels somehow fake. Sure, he'll be wearing the jersey and helmet of my favorite team, and once the games start I'll be able to push these feelings aside. But once the games are done, it'll feel like a sham, somewhat emptier than normal. And for those making the Vinny comparison, at least Vinny was a New York guy. Vinny was a Long Island paisan coming home, making the home fans proud. Favre, as well know, is from Mississippi. He's going even further from home, certainly from a cultural standpoint. Maybe if he was from Lodi I'd feel different.

2 - The team was going to be better this year without him. As I've pointed out before, last year the team had seven losses by seven points or less. So, sure, they were 4-12, but with some breaks and better line play on both sides of the ball, they could have just as easily been something like 7-9 or 8-8. They spent a lot of money in the offseason fixing the problems on the lines, so the odds were that the team was already going to be in the vicinity of 7 to 9 wins, even with Clemens or Pennington at QB. Bottom line is that no QB is good behind a crap offensive line (or even a line playing like crap for one game, just ask Tom Brady after the Super Bowl.) The line getting better means Clemens or Pennington were going to be better. Now Favre comes in, and say the team wins 9 games, Favre just gets to add to his mythology without really earning it.

3 - If the team isn't ready to win right now, why waste a year of developing a young QB? No one reasonably thinks that the Jets are winning the Super Bowl this year. At the very least the Patriots, the Colts, and the Chargers are better teams, not to mention Pittsburgh and Cleveland. And that's just the AFC. So, if that's the case, why not see what you have with Clemens? If he starts to come into his own, you are in great shape for 2009. If he's awful (which is what he was looking like last year) then you get a good draft pick and take another young QB in the first or second round and start over from there. Now we get one year of Brett Favre, two at the most, which means a year or two (but probably just one) of just good enough to be watchable but not good enough to do anything really interesting, which means a middle-round draft pick and another year or two of Clemens getting no game action. If it's not getting the team any closer to the Super Bowl now or next year or two years from now, why is this supposed to be exciting for me?

4 - I'd rather have relevance from success than from purchases. Maybe this is some warped old-world immigrant way of thinking, but I hate that the columnists all say that this finally gives the team relevance. It's not relevance earned, it's relevance paid for, which feels phony (and goes back to point #1). If the Jets were going to be relevant on the NFL landscape, I'd like it to be because they did the right thing as a franchise, built a tradition of drafting and signing the right players, being smart about how to build a team, and creating an overall culture of excellence. Like the Steelers have done, or the Pats have done under Kraft. I actually thought the Woody Johnson-Mike Tannenbaum-Eric Mangini regime was starting to do this, laying the foundation that might have started paying real dividends in the next three years. I'm not saying that the Favre thing undermines it altogether, but it certainly doesn't feel as genuine as the alternative.

5 - He's 38 years old. I've been of the opinion that Brett Favre has been washed up for about five years. He did have an excellent year last year, but that seemed to have as much to do with having an incredible defense and a strong offensive line than anything he was doing on his own. In his prime, Brett Favre by himself wins you an extra two to four games in a season. Now? You're lucky to break even, given how many bad interceptions he throws (see: the NFC Championship game against the Giants last year.) Old QBs can get really old really fast. Does he even have one more good year in him? I'm not totally convinced.


Look, I'll be super honest: if the Jets start out something like 6-2 and Favre looks like the real Brett Favre and he's making Coles and Cotchery look like Toon and Walker circa 1986, I'm sure I'll be giddy and writing laudatory columns on this site looking to name Favre President for Life. Right now I've got misgivings and feel like this move doesn't at all align with my personal philosophy, but I'm not that much of a masochist.

At the same time, the one thing I want more than anything as a Jets fan is to see the team win the whole thing. Not as a fluke, and not as a stunt. And let's be honest about something else - if the Jets do win the Super Bowl this year or next year, what does the story read? It reads "Brett Favre wins Super Bowl." Not the Jets, but Brett Favre. I'm not saying I'd hate that necessarily, but I'm not sure, today, that I'm going to love it as much as I should, either.