What would Tebow do? That’s the question, right? That’s the only question, if you understand his place and why he was made for it. Take a step back, and you’ll see that Tim Tebow , the dragon slayer and protector of all things good, who also happens to play quarterback for the Denver Broncos, isn’t a football player at all.
That’s what the air blowers and NFL purists just don’t get. “The Tebow” was never meant to be taken seriously. Just listen to him. He’s the sort of person who talks about Je-s-us, instead of Jesus — think about the way that kid from Campus Crusades sounds, and now you’ve got it.
And then he takes that knee and plants it in the ground in the most holy of genuflections for another round of Tebowing — go ahead and look up the Website devoted to this topic if you’re still confused.
The legend would already be immense for this saint among regular football players, but it gets better. HE JUST WINS!
Hopefully you’re getting it by now. The football arguments are ridiculous and unimportant. Tebow isn’t about the games on the field. The narrative is his polarizing character and legions of supporters.
His detractors should be capable of understanding what’s going on here, but many are naively tied to the idea that football operates as a meritocracy where the “most talented” athletes receive the glory and the lesser scrubs fall to the back. In other words, there are those that hope football works like an unbiased justice system where the bad guy always goes to Leavenworth.
In reality, entertainment — see football — almost never works this way. Do the best actors star in the highest-grossing blockbusters? Surely not, it’s all about casting.
And that’s the point. Tim Tebow is the perfect actor for a Midwestern football franchise that hasn’t been relevant since John Elway , the original Andrew Luck, retired. He sells jerseys, tickets and foam fingers like the most valuable player in the league, not one who is questioned on grounds of NFL competency.
His actual talent, whatever it may be, will never be important as long as he delivers record ratings and page hits. In fact, on those grounds, you could argue Tim Tebow was a steal towards the end of the first round in the 2010 NFL Draft.
The average fan might not want to accept this cold reality, but it doesn’t make it any less true. The benefactor that brought us Redzone , fantasy and towel waving is in fact an entertainment business where winning is defined by dollars, not championships.
In the excitement — and relief — of the end of the NFL lockout during the summer, we quickly forgot about the convoys of lawyers, union representatives and owners fighting over billions of dollars.
Not millions. Billions.
To his credit, Tim Tebow is by all accounts a remarkably genuine human being. The positive portrayals, for once, may actually do this young man justice. But at the end of the day, there’s really only one reason the Denver Broncos and the National Football League are chanting the hymn of Tim Tebow : Great big piles of the good stuff.
