Digital City

NFL Kickoff Weekend is a little less than a month away and the headlines are already at a TMZ-level of frenzy and it's not because of a shooting, a DUI or a banned substance. You know it as the Brett Favre Saga.

The Brett Favre speculation has taken a few years off the carpel tunnel time line for writers at sports sites and blogs and wrecked many a fantasy football draft.

With Favre fInally touching down with the New York Jets (yeah, aviation references along with rhyming jet and Brett are already cliche), hopefully Green Bay, Tampa, New York and the great State of Mississippi can now get on with their lives.

Favre, will be great for the Jets, if not on the scoreboard, then at least he makes them relevant when a wunderkind coach, a gimpy quarterback and a new stadium have failed to generate Eli Manning kind of excitement. But we'll leave the implications and on-the-field commentary to our friends at Fanhouse.

For the NFL, the Brett Favre Saga has broiught a lot of early, non-negative to the league attention at a time when the main audience of interest are die-hard fans and fantasy geeks watching camp reports.

In fact, with his unretirement, Brett Favre can save the economy single-handedly, well, single-armedly. People like the guy and want to watch him play. For the big companies, that means more Direct TV NFL Sunday Ticket subscriptions, more licensed merchandise sales, larger audiences for the networks driving up ad rates and more people on the Internet driving page views and ad sales.

For the smaller, local businesses, that means more people frequenting sports bars on Sundays, which means more tips for the waiters and more pizzas being ordered for delivery and more chicken wings being manufactured and all of this means more local taxes for the city to help build roads and hospitals and public works.

The amount of economic impact this could provide could significantly decrease the unemployment ranks. There could be a hiring spree from ad sales reps to construction workers to delivery drivers to sports bar personnel.

The Dems or GOPs can take credit for the idea and call it the Brett Favre Economic Stimulus Plan.

There are no losers in this plan. It looks like Aaron Rodgers is going to do just fine so even Green Bay wins.

In a twist, the only registered New York Jets bar in Packerland is Babe's in Madison, Wisconsin. If you're wondering where you can make sure Favre will always be on the TV on Sunday, check out the list of "Jets" bars near you on the Jest official Website. They have a list of Jets bars in the US and a smaller list of international Jets spots, but one of those places is some guy's house in Canada so you may want to call ahead.