"They won! The Lord is with him..."

[The Consul]

"Dear Lord Jesus, I know you don't like to watch football games on Saturdays and I know you probably are not listening right now, but if you can hear my prayer oh Lord, I beseech thee to grant us the strength, courage and enhanced talent to take it to the Patriots. I know Lord you have a whole universe of universes to deal with and this earth is full of evildoers who would piss on those of faith - I know Lord, I know...you have your hands full. Bless us oh Heavenly Father for having sent us your son....kinda like I was sent to Mile High Stadium to resurrect the faith in WINNING. Oh dear Jesus, if we lose don't let me be like Charlie Sheen, I care about the down trodden, and so do my agents, managers, brokers and fanclub president. Please God, grant us victory. God, Tom Brady is an asshole, everybody knows it! He never points up to the sky with both fingers like good players of faith always do. A win by them would be a win by the godless...dear Jesus...they do not deserve their name. Now I know Brady was a trumpeter for your faithful warrior Bush, but I don't think he really believed it. Dear Jesus, let us smite him! Please god....please...please....let us win...don't let them beat-o Teebow. Thank you Jesus for not letting the evil infidels make my mother abort me, oh Jesus, I am your humble servant in...VICTORY...love, Timmy."

[JackRiddler]

Saturday! That's what happened. Subversion of the Sabbath. Whether the real one is Sunday or Saturday, this guy's been violating the third commandment.

[vanlose kid]

Saturday! That's what happened. Subversion of the Sabbath. Whether the real one is Sunday or Saturday, this guy's been violating the third commandment.

careful there dude.

Tim Tebow, Converter of the Passes
What can a sloppily thrown 15-yard out pattern tell us about God and country?
By Brian Phillips
POSTED OCTOBER 25, 2011


Tebow/Marc Serota/Getty Images


Here's how I think it works, this Tebow madness.

• Somewhere within all our reptilian hearts lurks an instinct for trial-by-combat. This instinct tells us that when a person is strongly associated with an idea, we can use that person's success or failure within the sphere of competitive athletics as a legitimate indication of the quality of the idea. Did the green knight kill the blue knight? Then the queen must be innocent!1

• Tim Tebow has, for various reasons and despite the presence of many other religious athletes in the NFL, become the avatar or champion of evangelical Christianity in football.

• In doing so, he has managed to take on outsize significance in the league despite largely failing to excel on the field and despite the fact that the NFL already reads culturally like the result of a right-wing blogger shotgunning a wine cooler and deciding to "make things fabulous."2

• We all know that this is ludicrous, but we all kind of feel it anyway.

• As a result, it's basically impossible not to see Tebow's ability or inability to complete a 15-yard out pattern to Matt Willis as a referendum on the Book of Deuteronomy.

I'm not a churchgoer, personally. But even for me, Sunday's Miami-Denver game was a harrowing existential ride. For about three quarters, Tebow floundered, and it looked like the Living Water Bible Church out on Route 17 was wrong about pretty much everything. (Just as I suspected!) Then he rallied the Broncos for a heroic comeback and, d'oh, it seemed like there might be a god in the universe after all. And people called the win "overhyped"!

It's not as though, pre-Tebow, the NFL was lacking religiosity. I'm pretty sure Reggie White was actually a character in the Bible.3 And every sideline reporter has lived through this scenario —

SIDELINE REPORTER: What defensive adjustments did you make after the half that let you stop the run so effectively in the third quarter?
MIDDLE LINEBACKER: I thank Jesus Christ my personal Lord and Savior thine be the glory baby [kisses finger twice, points up at sky]

— so many times that they must all be terrified it'll start to happen in their regular, non-football lives:

SIDELINE REPORTER [at the UPS Store]: Does the 12-box jumbo pack come with bubble wrap?
UPS STORE CLERK: Hey, I just wanna give a shout-out to the Prince of Peace, Jehovah, my shepherd, everything I am is how He made me and all I do is for His name.

But Tebow's religiosity is different. For one thing, the public narrative of the Christian athlete normally involves a grown-up conversion experience: Deion Sanders on the Damascene Road. Tebow, by contrast, has been coming at the world with his own personal Good News since college, when he was still dewy from youth group. The son of missionaries, he always seemed religious in a way that, say, Kurt Warner didn't.4

The evangelical movement spends a lot of money and time coaching its kids on how to confront secular culture, but the kids don't usually reach a position at which they can confront it on a national-media scale — not as kids, anyway. But then here was Tebow, the quarterback at Florida, this articulate, successful young guy who was prepared to test all those techniques before a mass audience. He was calm. He was patient. He was totally committed, with the Bible verses on his eyeblack and his self-confessed virginity, but you never got the feeling he was judging you.

Instead, he was just respectfully taking in your mistakes and waiting to help you make a better call. At 20, he was America's camp counselor at a camp half the country never meant to attend.

Tebow self-consciously presented himself as a defender of the faith, filming anti-abortion commercials, flying around the world to help with his parents' missions. A lot of athletes have been religious advocates or preachers over the years, but they've generally acknowledged some token separation between their private faith and their public lives, even if the line often blurs. Reggie White appeared in ads opposing homosexuality, but not until after he retired. Tebow, on the other hand, gets press for circumcising Filipino babies. A trillion words have been written about this already, but suffice it to say that if you see him as the avatar of muscular Christianity in football, you know that in his bland, smiling, placidly self-confident way, he sees himself that way, too.

I'm sure there are people who manage to escape the demographic rooting pattern this creates. But in broad strokes, it's fair to say that how you feel about Tebow depends on how you feel about youth groups and Elisabeth Hasselbeck and, I don't know, WWJD bracelets and raft retreats with a lot of bonfires and swaying. Other religious players are religious individuals; Tebow is a whole culture. It helps that, as an NFL player, he's both nontraditional and kind of bad, which makes it easy to see his success as guided by a higher power — if a dude with that background and that throwing motion completes a touchdown pass, it almost has to be a miracle.

Whenever I catch one of Tebow's games, I tend to lose sight of the scoreboard and just focus on the metacompetition, the weird Joan of Arc drama that seems to go along with everything he does. I imagine a bar under a train station somewhere where the relevant ideas men gather to learn their fates. Did a receiver drop a pass? James Dobson just choked on a nacho. Did Tim throw an interception? Daniel Dennett just chest-bumped Richard Dawkins. Again, I realize that this is stupid, that it's beyond stupid, but compared to actually watching the Broncos? It'll do.

I find myself half-consciously rooting for Tebow to fail, even though I have nothing against him, have lots of religious friends, am not especially tribal by nature, and wouldn't want to be responsible for the nacho-related deaths of any prominent evangelical leaders, even if I detest their politics. Doesn't matter. The part of me that wants to eat pork and not stone people just switches on and cheers for the blitzing linebacker.

There's a problem with this, though, a problem that I'm convinced lies at the heart of the minor cultural puzzle that Tebow represents. The problem is that if you're rooting against Tebow because he's religious, you're giving way to the trial-by-combat impulse. And the whole idea of the trial by combat is that there's a higher power adjudicating the combat. It means something for the blue knight to kill the green knight only if God is moving the swords. So what I, many secular football fans, and Imaginary Daniel Dennett are really rooting for is for God to make Tim Tebow fail as a means of discrediting Himself, God, in accordance with our wishes, and against His, God's, own interests.

This — arguably — doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Other religious players are religious individuals; Tebow is a whole culture.

For the sake of argument, let's say that the universe is radically meaningless. If that's the case, then when Tebow wins, it's a fluke that doesn't prove anything. When he loses, it's also a fluke that doesn't prove anything. For his losing to mean anything, it has to tie into some larger cosmic order, and if it does, then it can't prove that there isn't one. Since no one really knows whether the universe is meaningless or not, things rapidly grow confusing. Tebow scoring a two-point conversion on an off-tackle power play could prove that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, or it could, well, not. Tebow's getting picked off after telegraphing a pass could doom us to a state of terrifying metaphysical uncertainty, especially if we are the Broncos' quarterbacks coach.5 But if you're against Tebow, you can't read too much into Tebow's failures, or else Tebow has already won.

From a theological standpoint, it's so hard to say what you're actually rooting for and how it aligns with specific on-field outcomes that it almost seems to make more sense not to bring religion or politics or philosophy into the NFL, or maybe any sport, at all. But then what the hell have we been watching?

Brian Phillips is a staff writer for Grantland. You can find him on Twitter at @runofplay.

––––––
1. Did Duke win a national championship? Abolish the capital gains tax!

2. The F-15 flyovers, the martial fanfares, the crisp green lawns, the body armor, the commercials in which giant whooshing branding irons burn the low APR of a Chevy Silverado directly onto the screen, etc. It's as if the guy who invented Branson, Mo., looked at his work and said, "Screw this, I can do better."

3. "And lo, by his totally just sweeping 300-pound offensive tackles aside with one arm shall ye recognize him. By his just absolutely body-slamming Doug Flutie shall the mark of his coming be known."

4. Even though Warner seemed weirder than Tebow in numerous other ways. Actually, it's Tebow's manifest nonweirdness that sets the rest of this up.

5. On the other hand, if we're a free safety on the opposing team, Tebow's throwing motion might make us suspect that there is a God after all.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/714 ... ter-passes

*

[chump]

Tebow put the whole football thing into perspective by mentioning his friend Zack during the press conference after the game.

Tebow: The man behind the mania
The 20-year-old former high school football player won't snag any touchdown throws from his hero Saturday at Gillette Stadium when the Denver Broncos' on-field miracle-worker challenges the New England Patriots in an AFC Divisional playoff game. But (Zack) McLeod just may catch a pass — and more compassion and love than he ever imagined.

As kickoff approaches, Tebow will do what he always does at pressure-packed times — give of himself. The 24-year-old quarterback will spend a few moments with McLeod , who suffered a traumatic brain injury playing football in 2008. They plan to meet on the sidelines as part of the Tebow Foundation's Wish 15 program that grants requests for young people with serious medical issues.

I can definitely relate to those videos that 2012 posted above.

This one was taken right near where we sit at the games. If I looked hard enough I could probably find my wife and my son. They enjoy the games more than I do, so hell yeah, I told them to go... BTW, those tickets are something that I myself do not neccesarily approve of. That's her deal. She doesn't want to give up those season tickets. Her uncle got them In the beginning... She and her sister used to go... Until her sister died... There are a lot of ghosts at Mile Hi... But, I did have the game on at home.


Everybody's happy when the Broncos win... entranced by the highlights, again and again and again... Wow... that was really great... great... great... great...


Beeline's prediction was almost right on the money! How did you know that man? Did you see Josh McDaniels up in this press box with his binoculars and his phone!? No wonder the Broncos got sacked!


The balloon has definitely popped: Broncos Betty was the only fan to welcome the team back to Dove Valley... kinda sad and kinda funny... Video at link:
http://www.9news.com/news/article/24255 ... -Patriots-


Oh yeah! I ran accross this awhile back:
http://blog.chron.com/rickperry/2012/01 ... andidates/

Tebow won't Be Endorsing Any Political Candidates
1/10/12

Evangelical all-star Tim Tebow said he won’t make political endorsements, despite multiple requests from Republican presidential candidates who hope his clout could appeal to conservative Christian voters.
The AP reported:

Sensing the excitement and loving his message, Tebow is also being courted by Republican presidential candidates. The quarterback recently told The Associated Press he’s been asked by more than one of the contenders for his support. He wouldn’t name names, but did say he’d declined the offer.

“I think you have to have so much trust in who you support, just from product endorsements to endorsing a candidate because if that person or company does something (bad), it reflects on you,” said Tebow, who’s a pitchman for Nike, Jockey and FRS energy drink.

Tebow has, however, placed himself in the political realm before — two Super Bowls ago when he starred in a Focus on the Family commercial with his mother sharing the story of how she gave birth to him in the Philippines in 1987 after spurning a doctor’s advice to have an abortion for medical reasons. After being criticized for that ad, he didn’t do an encore and instead tries to toe the line of showing his religion without shoving it down people’s throats.

=============================
http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... orsement/1

It appears that some conservative Republicans looking to stop Mitt Romney want the ultimate endorsement. Tim Tebow.

Tebow, whose unorthodox quarterback skills and public professions of Christianity have made him a national sensation, told the Associated Press that several Republicans have sought his endorsement, though he's not making one...

The good thing is that I won't be watching (much) football for awhile. I was about over it... Whatever! Now the Nuggets are playing well!!

:praybow

[JackRiddler]

Saturday! That's what happened. Subversion of the Sabbath. Whether the real one is Sunday or Saturday, this guy's been violating the third commandment.

careful there dude.

Was that too sacrilegious?

Thank you for posting that hilarious article. I laughed hard at "it's basically impossible not to see Tebow's ability or inability to complete a 15-yard out pattern to Matt Willis as a referendum on the Book of Deuteronomy."

The problem is that if you're rooting against Tebow because he's religious, you're giving way to the trial-by-combat impulse. And the whole idea of the trial by combat is that there's a higher power adjudicating the combat. It means something for the blue knight to kill the green knight only if God is moving the swords. So what I, many secular football fans, and Imaginary Daniel Dennett are really rooting for is for God to make Tim Tebow fail as a means of discrediting Himself, God, in accordance with our wishes, and against His, God's, own interests.

Not at all. Why root for any team, ever, even though one has no impact on the outcome? For a relatively harmless and atavistically pleasurable enactment of the tribal impulse. (Harmless in theory, at least.) Or else, to be right in one's assessments of the teams' strengths prior to the game (boosting the ego or winning money on a bet). Here the writer has taken the metaphor of Tebow's performance as a verdict on religion too far. Those who believe his success reflects divine help annoy and indeed harrass a great many outside their circle. (Hence the title, "Irritating Jesus Freak.") When he loses, we derive a minor pleasure, not because anything is moved in the debate about religion, but out of schadenfreude at their annoyance. Petty minded, I know. But waaah, they started it by making a symbol of this guy and his ridiculous piety.

You know, it's nice that he does all this charitable work. Whatever. It does good and is doubtless well-intended but it still serves as PR for an effort to convert people to his fucked-up religion. His public persona is of a guy who does anti-abortion spots and cuts the tips off babies' genitals in the Philippines because he thinks God commanded him to it, and who encourages an already dumbed-down yahoo population to see a comic-book deity behind the outcome of a football play -and therefore gays must be reined in and schools must be barred from teaching history, including evolution, amen.

Oh, and I like this, wrt his refusal to endorse one of the Republicans:

“I think you have to have so much trust in who you support, just from product endorsements to endorsing a candidate because if that person or company does something (bad), it reflects on you,” said Tebow, who’s a pitchman for Nike, Jockey and FRS energy drink.

Sound understanding that a) you can't trust those guys and b) he has a lot more to lose than they do.

.

[The Consul]

So according to one poll 38% of the people believed Denver's win over Pittsburg was due to "divine intervention" while only 37% said huh uh (the rest just went...are you serious? What did these brilliant, faithfull hearts believe when Denver was slaughtered by Patriots? Timmy forgot to say his prayers before the game? The Faithfull did not pray hard enough for the win? Tom Brady is the Anti-Christ? He musteth accepteth humiliation prior to his final ascension? Will it happen next year during superbowel half time...Saint Timoty coming out of the tunnel, arms held out like the Blessed Virgin, slowly rising above the stadium…shit…the blimp…get it out of the way, quick! Will Saint Timmy glow in the dark? Will he initiate The Rapture with an overtime win over godless San Francisco and all her gays?

Has this country gone totally, completely and irredeemably insane?
I can see little Joey finishing up his night time prayers "Please oh jesus save us from hell, abortionists and...oh, yes, one more thing, God. Please inspire & give strength to St. Teebow so he might read the blitz and throw a quick out to the sideline. Amen."

[slomo]

Has this country gone totally, completely and irredeemably insane?

You really have to ask?

[vanlose kid]

Saturday! That's what happened. Subversion of the Sabbath. Whether the real one is Sunday or Saturday, this guy's been violating the third commandment.

careful there dude.

Was that too sacrilegious?

....

nah, dude, just a ref to the knots Brian Phillips wrote about. once you go down that road... etc. all in good fun.

*

[beeline]

.

Just for shits and giggles, my thoughts on this weekend's games:


Muddy conditions and turnovers contribute to a sloppy NFC Chapmionship game where defense and special teams rule the day. Eli leads the Giants for a 4th quarter rally, but the New York sqaud falls short with a tunover in the red zone with time running out in the 4th.

In New England, Tom Brady is intercepted three times but manages to lead the Patriots to a victory, 38-35 over Baltimore with two touchdowns to Rob Gronkowski and Wes Welker each and a game-winning field goal by Gostkowski with time running out.

Book it.

[JackRiddler]

.

Just for shits and giggles, my thoughts on this weekend's games:

49ers vs. Giants

Muddy conditions contribute to a sloppy NFC Chapmionship game where defence and special teams rule the day.

Not so fast. Is that a bettable proposition? I want a spread and an over-under, guv!

.

[beeline]

.

Just for shits and giggles, my thoughts on this weekend's games:

49ers vs. Giants

Muddy conditions contribute to a sloppy NFC Chapmionship game where defence and special teams rule the day.

Not so fast. Is that a bettable proposition? I want a spread and an over-under, guv!

.

Sorry I am on my phone, complete prognostication edited for clarity.

[82_28]

The NFL is dead to me right now. It was dead all last season too. I can watch football, but only the shirts the men wear in Denver who play football make me hyperventilate, increase blood pressure and shit.

I hope Tebow doesn't go to the dark side. Shit, a 37 year old old-timer could tell a 24 year old athlete who plays for the team you love for some goddamned reason that he's wrong and should stroll with us. Kid needs to focus on football and winning games -- period. I like him quite a bit. I used to work around Broncos players on a daily basis and dude's can be cool and it's fun to run into them and also drive their cars when you valet!

[Saurian Tail]

And just like that ... Manning is in and Tebow is out. Nice knowing you kid.

Tebow will probably end up in Jacksonville or Miami where things will be even more insane!

Peyton Manning picks Broncos

By Chris Mortensen and Adam Schefter | ESPN
Updated: March 19, 2012, 12:34 PM ET

Peyton Manning will become the next quarterback of the Denver Broncos, barring a snag during intensified contract negotiations that have commenced under the instruction of the four-time MVP to his agent Tom Condon, according to multiple sources.

Once the Manning deal becomes official, Denver will try to trade Tim Tebow, according to sources.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/77091 ... ources-say

[Marie Laveau]

Now, just wait a minute!

Jesus drop-kicked Tebow from the Broncos because he has something BETTER for him.

You gotta keep up with the game.

[beeline]

Now, just wait a minute!

Jesus drop-kicked Tebow from the Broncos because he has something BETTER for him.

You gotta keep up with the game.

I gaurantee he is an Eagle by week's end.