Brett the Jet

Next stop: East Rutherford

Through the looking glass, indeed: Brett Favre, the NFL's all-time leader in passing yards and touchdowns, a man synonymous with the Green Bay Packers, a quarterback who led his team to the last year's NFC title game, has been traded to the New York Jets for a conditional 4th round pick in the 2009 draft. If nothing else, the trade has transformed the Jets from a reloaded team - they spent a collective $140 million in free agency this offseason - without a starting quarterback into the NFL's number one sideshow, sure to garner all manner of attention from the media and the league despite being far and away the second best team (on paper) in the AFC East. Chad Pennington, the Jets' number one, oft-injured QB option for the past five seasons, he of the Rhodes Scholar head and noodle arm, is undoubtedly on the way out, either via trade or release. Kellen Clemens, drafted to be the QB of the future, will now spend at least one season, and - with Favre, who knows? - possibly more, under the tutelage of one of the league's all-time great field generals. As for Favre himself, it's fairly clear he would have preferred to play somewhere else, probably in the NFC where the way to a Super Bowl is far clearer than in an AFC where the Patriots and Colts stand as perennial obstacles to such ambitions. Yet, he is in New York, the number one media market in the league, the biggest of stages, a place where he will have the opportunity to wrest the spotlight away from Eli Manning and the defending champion Giants. He is also (and what a sad commentary this is) without playing a down in green and white probably the best player to put on a Jets uniform since...Mark Gastineau? Broadway Joe Namath? Hell, by the numbers he's better than either. In any event, since I brought up the Giants' improbable Super Bowl title, what that little miracle (which, it should be noted, cut off Favre's own championship ambitions off at the knees last season) tells us is that in the NFL, any team can win in any year, given the right chips falling where they may. The Giants were not, by any stretch of the imagination a great team; by all rights, they should have honked it in Dallas, or a frigid Green Bay, or, Lord knows, in Glendale facing down the mightest juggernaut in the history of the league. Yet they emerged triumphant, an emphatic rejoinder to a destiny that had seemed written in the stars, or at least in the Boston Globe. So, for the forecasters running down Jets' fans' dreams by prognosticating a Wild Card at best finish because of the big, bad cheating Pats, let us all remember who won the NFC East last year.