Evidently, nobody was surprised on Saturday when the New England Patriots released Tim Tebow. Which makes this apparent end to his NFL career all the more ignominious – considering that virtually everybody was hailing him as the league’s savior just three years ago, during his rookie season. Apropos of which, remember this almost blasphemous, all-cap headline from the cover of the September 2012 issue of GQ Magazine?:
NFL KICK-OFF 2012: BROTHERS, HAVE YOU ACCEPTED TIM TEBOW AS YOUR SUNDAY SAVIOR?
But here we are; and, truth be told, he played throughout this (try-out) pre-season like a fourth-rate quarterback on a team looking only for a second-rate one to backup their superstar, Tom Brady. It will take a miracle now for Tebow to resurrect his NFL career….
The irony, of course, is that he started off his career as something of a miracle worker – a moniker he encouraged with his trademark kneeling in prayer (aka tebowing) during games for the world to see. In fact, there seemed no limit to the last-minute heroics he could pull off to help his team, the Denver Broncos, win.
Moreover, you would have been hard-pressed to find a single sports analyst back then who was aware and prescient enough to see that his manner of Hail-Mary play was wholly unsustainable and that his career would amount to little more than an Icarian flight.
By contrast, here is how I pooh-poohed the praise they were heaping on Tebow and predicted what has now befallen him:
That Tebow beat out Kobe Bryant, Aaron Rodgers, and Drew Brees to win a recent ESPN poll for ‘America’s favorite athlete’ demonstrates again how exaggerated and misguided the hosannas to him really are.
In any case, I am pretty sure this phenomenon will die a media death this weekend when Tom Brady and the New England Patriots show Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos, in convincing fashion, that winning football games has absolutely nothing to do with how much of a spectacle one makes of praying to God.
(‘The Divine Tim Tebow? Puhleese!” The iPINIONS Journal, January 12, 2012)
Brady and the Patriots did just that. Therefore, forget being released by the Patriots this year, I wasn’t even surprised when the Broncos released Tebow in 2011 after just one season, despite his cult of celebrity – as I duly noted in “Denver Broncos: We Want Peyton; Tebow Can Go to Hell, The iPINIONS Journal, March 20, 2012.
What’s more, I telegraphed him being picked up by another team as follows:
I have no doubt that some other team will be happy to exploit what little remains of the ‘tebowing’ phenomenon by signing Tebow to hang out on the side lines like a de facto mascot.
(“Denver Broncos: We want Peyton; Tebow can go to Hell,” The iPINIONS Journal, March 20, 2012)
Sure enough the Jets took the bait.
To be fair, the Jets claim they will use him as a running quarterback on third-down plays. But this only reinforces the inadequacies of both Sanchez and Tebow (i.e., that they are both needed to play this one position: one to pass, the other to pass and/or run).
(“Tebow to the Jets,” The iPINIONS Journal, March 23, 2012)
But:
Frankly, Tebow had to know his days were numbered when, midway through last season, ‘gangnam style’ replaced tebowing as the latest viral sensation. And now that it’s clear his presence on the sidelines does more to undermine than uplift esprit de corps, there really is no reason for any team to hire him.
(“God Ignores Tebow’s Prayers,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 3, 2013)
What’s more, having since embraced the viral sensations of planking (aka “facedowns”) and twerking, most fad-obsessed, Twitter-brained Americans probably regard tebowing today as something that was fashionable decades ago. And, alas, without tebowing, Tebow is nothing … in the NFL.
This is why I was truly surprised, if not stupefied, when the Patriots picked him up after the Jets threw him away earlier this year. As it turned out all the Patriots did was delay the inevitable … for a pre-season.
On the other hand, I think he would make a killing as a mega-church, prosperity-gospel preaching televangelist….
(“God Ignores Tebow’s Prayers,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 3, 2013)
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