And now Brett Favre is the starting quarterback for the New York Jets. I think if you asked anybody last January, right before Eli Manning and the Giants stomped every storybook fantasy that every NFL fan who wasn’t from Minnesota or Chicago secretly harbored, if there were any chance that Brett Favre would end up playing quarterback for a low-grade AFC team unlikely to even make the playoffs in 2009, you’d have been laughed straight out of the room and made offers of increasingly ludicrous bets, just for fun.

But now, hell- you’d look like the smartest guy in the room, which is part and parcel of the prognosticating package. The future is weird and unpredictable.

You know there are a good handful of people predicting that John McCain won’t even be the nominee in a month? It sounds ridiculous right now, sure, but so did the notion of Brett Favre in green and white instead of green and yellow not too long ago… Anything’s possible, you know, and with the campaign McCain’s been running, this is starting to make some sense. I’m not saying it’ll happen, but if you offered me the right odds, I might put up ten pounds or so, just for the hell of it.

If McCain wasn’t planning on sticking this thing out- or if his people were planning on dumping him two days before the Republican National Convention, leaving him to stagger around Minneapolis humiliated, like Prince after Morris Day steals Apollonia out from under him in Purple Rain- then this would be an ideal approach to the election. Set up McCain, with the nastiest campaign strategists to emerge from the Atwater-to-Rove axis of the GOP, as the heel, launching a vicious, substance-free campaign designed solely to define Obama as a dangerous political lightweight. There’s no need for McCain to define or identify himself in any way, because no one is going to be expected to vote for him. He’s just using the pulpit of the presumptive nominee to throw body blows against the Obama brand, a scorched-earth policy without the risk of forever marring himself as a dirty campaigner with nothing positive to offer. Work the body, leave the electorate stumbling and tired of the whole game, and then drop out- health concerns or exhaustion or whatever- so a new face, novel and uncontroversial, suddenly strides into the campaign, a new hope for people who’ve seen only the ugly side of McCain, but who no longer trust Obama.

It makes a certain amount of sense on paper, doesn’t it? If I were writing a movie, this would be the third-act twist… Just when you think the Joker’s safely behind bars, the entire police station explodes and now you’ve got both the evil clown and Two-Face stalking the streets of Gotham.

But this isn’t a movie, and it isn’t even the NFL. It’s not that politics are so much more serious or important- if you look at the numbers, John McCain has only raised $143 million for his campaign, a hundred million dollars less than the Packers took in last year. It’s just that there’s not a lot of reason to be confident that this would actually work. McCain’s numbers aren’t that bad- his biggest problem is his ground-game, and no matter who the GOP might tap to replace him, that’s only going to be worse with a September Surprise. Combine that with the fact that there’s not really any better candidate waiting in the wings, and you can pretty much forget this as a simple thought exercise for a Thursday morning.

But you could have said that about Favre in a Jets uniform, too. Given that John McCain spent all day yesterday embroiled in an energy policy debate with Paris Hilton, reaching the silliness threshold of 2008 could yet be a long way off. I wouldn’t bet a whole lot of money on it happening, but these are unpredictable times, and I wouldn’t rule anything out at all.