Favre-mania Grips Jets Nation, nyjets.com

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Randy's Radar

Favre-mania Grips Jets Nation, nyjets.com

Published: Thu, August 7, 2008 - 10:42am EDT
Randy Lange

By Randy Lange

Lange is editor-in-chief of newyorkjets.com. He covered the Jets for 13 years for The Record of Hackensack, N.J.


File Under: Mike Tannenbaum, Woody Johnson, Brett Favre

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08/07 — A friend of mine and I back in my former life as a newspaper journalist used to have an exclamation for a situation that cried out for something more that a simple "Wow!" We would say, "This ... was a Wa-OOH!"

Today in Jets lands it's a Wa-OOH.

The trade for QB Brett Favre has made my morning incredibly interesting. The crush of new and old interest in No. 4 and the Jets has been off the charts. I know we've been getting 100,000-plus visitors to our site every hour, and that was before the sun came up. Now I can only imagine.

Another way for me to measure the intense interest in Favre finally coming to New York (after the Jets tried but just missed drafting him in 1991) are the comments being sent to the Radar. On a normal busy day after a newsworthy development, I might have 20 comments waiting for me in the morning.

Today, after five hours of sleep (sorry, had to crash), there were 164 comments. And as I tried to get them up on the site, I realized this was a lot like shoveling sand against the tide. Or as my good friend Al Pereira, the Jets team photographer, just said, "It's like trying to push a car up a hill with a rope."

On top of that, the aforementioned traffic to newyorkjets.com has been so great this morning that as I try to work, I keep getting logged off of my site.

As a result, I apologize to all you Radar readers who are waiting to check out your comments and those of your fellow Jets fans and Cheeseheads and Favre-siders. I was able to get a number up of comments up, some from 3:30 a.m. and some more recent, before the system cut out on me.

Here is a link to SportsNet New York's SportsNite report on the Favre trade.

I can tell you that Eric Allen and I will be working all day. EA will be covering Favre things back in the New York area. I'll be working all day to try to clear the decks of all comments before I head the short distance from the team hotel to Cleveland Browns Stadium for tonight's preseason opener.

Kickoff is 7:30 p.m. but at 6 p.m. the Jets will hold a news conference featuring Jets chairman and CEO Woody Johnson, GM Mike Tannenbaum ... and Favre.

I can also tell you that things will pick up once the Jets return home to training camp. Jets Fest and Jets Shop at Hofstra, which were originally scheduled to be dark Friday on the players' day off after the Browns game, will now be open from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Then on Saturday (single practice) and Sunday (double practice), Jets Fest and Jets Shop will both be open from 8 a.m.-8 p.m.

That's another Wa-OOH. One of many more to come, I suspect.

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