So what's with the nickname, anyway -- Broadway Chad? Could anything be any more off? Chad Pennington is a lot of things -- funny, charming, harmlessly goofy. But he's anything but Broadway. You half expect a handsome 26-year-old who's suddenly the toast of New York to roll out of practice early, grab a bite with Ben and J.Lo at Tribeca Grill, move on to scout the brickhouses at Shine with Jeter and shake off the hangover just soon enough to lead the Jets into the next round of the playoffs.

	Chad's road to the top had its share of bumps.

Not this quarterback. And not this season, which has not been about red carpets and free drinks, VIP rooms and downtown clubs.

Broadway Chad? Not even close.

Most nights, Pennington leaves the Jets complex around 9 p.m., and when he does, he stops thinking about being a quarterback and starts thinking about being a husband. As much as the Jets need him as a player, his family needs him more as a person. Around the time Pennington was promoted to the starting job in Week 5, his father-in-law was found to have leukemia. It's a secret he's kept from the public and many of his teammates. For one thing, he's so protective of his father-in-law's privacy that he asked that his name not be used in print. For another, Pennington knows that as challenging as this year has been, the day-to-day worries his wife, Robin, is going through make third-and-12 seem insignificant.

And he knows that he's learning a lot about himself as a quarterback and as a person.

Before he goes to sleep each night, Pennington asks himself two questions: Have I done everything I can to be the best quarterback I can be? (The answer is usually yes.) Have I done everything I can to be the best husband I can be? (The answer is sometimes yes.)

"That's where the challenge has been," he says. "Balancing football and life. Trying not to replay every play in my head while I'm with my family, so I can be there for them as much as possible. Sometimes, I've done it well. Other times, I haven't."

The night before he threw three touchdown passes and led the Jets to a 41-0 clubbing of the Colts in their wild-card playoff game, Pennington visited his father-in-law in a Long Island hospital and rubbed his head for good luck. Wishing for good luck? Even Pennington laughs at the very thought of relying on something other than himself. He's a fixer, a guy who keeps everything to himself. His sole source of confidence comes from the inside. He's not so much frightened by failure as he is scared of being unprepared. He loves giving himself something to live up to.

That's why, four weeks ago, well before his 10 touchdown passes in the season's last three weeks, and after a demoralizing Week 15 loss to Chicago had left the Jets' playoff hopes in purgatory, Pennington rose from behind a desk at the team complex and in true Namath fashion said, without blinking, "We'll be in the playoffs."

So now New York has a new star, the non-night-timing Chad Willie, who led the Jets from a 1–4 start to a division championship and the playoffs. Someone who's sweet, sensitive and real, with good knees to boot. If you're looking for Pennington to show up in the gossip columns, keep searching. The most he sees of Manhattan is from the windows on pregame bus rides from Long Island to New Jersey. He studies so much film that coach Herman Edwards told Pennington to stop watching before the playoff game with the Colts.

"I don't want Chad taking football too seriously," Edwards says. "He needs to enjoy it. During games, I'll make a point of asking him, 'Are you having fun? I want you having fun.'"

Jets teammates give Pennington a hard time about his pregame head-butts, but it's something he's done his entire football-playing life. As quiet as he is off the field, his locker room persona is loud and goofy. His locker is in the same corner as those of fullback Richie Anderson and wide receivers Laveranues Coles and Santana Moss, the Jets' leaders in freestyle rapping. Most days, Pennington will hop in and break off one himself. Of course, with his Tennessee drawl, Pennington is more Johnny Cash than Eminem, but he does what he can:

My name is Chad
And I'm not partial,
But if you're looking for a QB,
Look toward Marshall.

This is why they love him. As a student at the Webb School in Knoxville, where his parents, Elwood and Denise, are teachers, his father taught Chad how to be everyone's friend without trying to win a popularity contest. Pennington learned to treat people as people, and to hold friendships high on sunny and rainy days. This is why, after a touchdown, Pennington always head-butts his linemen first. It's why he had the confidence to iron out a budding tear in his relationship with Wayne Chrebet, speaking with him privately when the wideout complained about not seeing enough passes. It's why Chad gets wild -- pumping his arms, howling, coaxing crowd noise -- not after a touchdown pass, but when Vinny Testaverde gets mop-up time in blowouts. Says Testaverde: "He is a perfect teammate."

	With Gang Green on top, comparisons to Namath are being thrown around.

Remember, Pennington had to learn how to be this good. As the 18th pick in the 2000 draft, he didn't figure to beat out Testaverde for the starting spot right away. He wasn't patient enough or confident enough in his decisions to handle Paul Hackett's West Coast offense. He was tentative, opting for the safe dump-off instead of holding the ball for another half-second and hitting a big play. His footwork was sloppy, too. He'd scribble messages to himself in his diary ("Stay patient"), but the message wasn't getting through.

"He wasn't throwing the ball," Edwards says. "He was scared of making mistakes." The coach began challenging his quarterback, on the field and in the media. Pennington took it to heart. "I remember exactly when I realized he'd gotten our message," Edwards says. "It was in minicamp, and he dropped back and fired a post pass right between a linebacker and a safety. He threw that ball. I said to myself right there, 'He got it.'"

Hackett studied the best teams from 2001, and concluded that except for turnovers, completion percentage was the surest indicator of success. Figuring Pennington would take over the starting job at some point, Hackett concentrated on improving the kid's footwork, believing that would improve his accuracy. The two spent hours together inside the Jets' bubbled practice field, working on Pennington's drop. Says Hackett, "It came together out there."

Then, before Week 5, with the 1–3 Jets needing a spark, Edwards called Pennington into his office. A five-minute conversation ended when Edwards said, "Chad, it's your team. Don't look back."

Pennington tingled for a moment, then took over. His first game was a tough 29-25 loss to Kansas City, but his quarterback rating was 108 and Edwards knew he had his man. Despite the loss, Pennington was euphoric to find himself on the field. And it was right around then that life started going bad.

Soon after, Robin's father was given the diagnosis, and the prognosis was not good. Pennington called Jets doctor Elliot Pellman for help, and Pellman assisted in recommending hospitals for chemotherapy. The team persuaded Chad to move his father-in-law from his home in West Virginia to New York. "This illness happened so quickly," Pennington says. "We were all stunned."

On Sundays, though, you couldn't tell anything was wrong. He won five of his first seven starts while leading the league in completion percentage and passing. (He ended the season first in both categories, at 68.9% with a 104.2 rating.) Coles started calling him Broadway Chad. Young women started painting No. 10 on their cheeks on game days.

But Pennington knew his family was hurting, and he had only so much time to share with them. And he knew he hadn't always found grace under similar circumstances in the past. In 1995, Chad's favorite fishing buddy, his grandfather James, died while en route to see one of his games his freshman year at Marshall. Chad didn't find out until after the game; to this day, he hasn't visited the grave. The hurt stayed inside.

Despite playing better than ever, Pennington was torn. He'd finally gotten the break he needed, and he knew he couldn't blow it, but his wife needed him more than ever. "He cares so much about them," says reserve wide receiver Tory Woodbury. "We've been in meetings and I've looked over at Chad, and I could tell he was thinking about his wife and his father-in-law."

Pennington tried to hold up both ends, but he didn't always succeed. He and Robin would be in the car, and while she was talking to him, he'd be so focused on football that she'd interrupt herself and sigh, "What play are you on now?" Chad was spinning himself too tight and he had to force himself to do something he'd never done before.

"I've had to learn how to leave football here at this building," he says. "Because this isn't about me, and how I'm dealing with it. Through all this hype that's going on, and how our lives have been like a hurricane, my family has been able to still show compassion toward me and love me, and at the same time do everything they can to help our situation. When you talk about courage and toughness, it's not about me. It's about them."

When Chad and Robin visit her father in the hospital between his chemo treatments, the talk winds up drifting toward the Jets. It's happily evolved from hopes for the playoffs to expectations of the Super Bowl. Wonderfully, the chemo seems to be helping. And, like he did before the Colts game, Pennington always rubs his father-in-law's head before leaving: "It's a good luck charm. He loves to watch these games. That's nice, because it gives us something to talk about and focus on. But you know, he's doing good. He's hanging in there. I wish I could provide entertainment for him under different circumstances, but he's enjoying what we've done. He smiles."

There's been a lot of that going around lately. An hour after the victory over the Colts, Pennington stands outside the Jets locker room posing for pictures and signing autographs. Chad's parents, sister Andrea and Robin all wait, beaming. Finally, after a thousand can-you-sign-this entreaties, Pennington does his best scramble of the day, weaving through the masses and landing a bear-size hug and kiss on Robin. They whisper something and laugh, the way couples do. Finally, as they walk off arm-in-arm, he turns one last time and waves to the cheering fans.

And at just that moment -- wouldn't you know it? -- someone yells out to him:

"Broadway!"

This article appears in the January 20 issue of ESPN The Magazine.