No, they shouldn’t. Starting Jeff Tuel sounds dismal, but he’s been in camp with them. It makes more sense to use him than to bring in Tebow without any practice time (we saw how that went with Leinart). And EJ Manuel should be healthy soon.
I’m guessing everybody already knows, but the Patriots did cut Tebow after all.
Let’s see how it goes with Johnny Manziel.
Except for the national championship, he’s on a similar track, except not anybody’s idea of a boy scout and certainly not upheld as a role model (except possibly by the more irrational Aggies - which I guess describes most Aggies anyway).
Something tells me even with success, he won’t have the same type of notoriety.
Success is certainly necessary, but the evangelicals didn’t just push him over the top, they established the hype machine to begin with.
The other factors (collegiate success, race, religion, naysayers) have existed, to varying degrees, with other athletes without conferring anything remotely close to the same reaction. As with many other things, it’s when you add in the completely irrational reaction of evangelicals and their general ability to deny reality that you get the Tebow phenomenon.
Thing is, as I’ve noted, there have been MANY legitimately stellar quarterbacks who were clean living, milk-drinking born-again Christian types who didn’t get nearly the adulation from evangelical Christians that Tim Tebow got, AND didn’t get nearly the resentment from secular types.
Kurt Warner was as ostentatiously Christian as Tebow, and an All-Pro/borderline Hall of Famer who led three teams to the Super Bowl. He was neither as loved by Christians nor as loathed by secularists as Tebow.
Warner didn’t star in a Super Bowl commercial before he even played in the NFL and he didn’t invent a prayer gesture. He worked his way up from nothing and his outspoken evangelism became better-known as he established himself as a star quarterback. Social media was also in an earlier stage when he got started. So he may be just as Christian as Tebow, but at least he was a successful pro first. The public has been inundated with Tebow the All-American Saint stories since early in his college career.
Seriously, it’s true. I can’t name any NFL guys(well, maybe Michael Vick because of the dog thing), but I can tell you who Tebow is and his “pose” he does.
I have naturally assumed he was awesome at football. I’m stunned to be reading that he sucks and has been cut.
Did he do the pre-playing-marketing himself or did it kind of rise around him?
To be fair, neither did Tebow. He was just doing what came naturally, and the media picked it up and made it a big thing. He’s still a lousy QB and shouldn’t get another gig in the NFL.
I wasn’t 100% convinced of that, but it sounds like that’s what happened. (A fan copied the gesture, then it went viral.) I stand by the larger point, though: I don’t remember hearing a word about Kurt Warner’s religion until he was a star. I heard all about his rise from supermarket bag boy to Arena Football League QB to starter for the Rams, but not that much about his religion. And since he wasn’t famous as an amateur I don’t think he was presented as an exemplar of morality in sports.
The more I think about this the more I think social media has a lot to do with it. Warner broke into the NFL earlier than I remembered- he started with the Rams in 1998. Now that we have Facebook and Twitter, the whole process of a person rising to great fame and then annoying the shit out of everyone through rampant overexposure is much, much more efficient. If Tebow had been drafted in 1998 perhaps he would have seemed less unbearable. But he still wouldn’t have done very well as an NFL quarterback.
Well, Kurt Warner was an undrafted nobody in college, and barely snuck into the NFL several years later, and only became a star years after that.
So not quite a similar situation to Tebow.
Fair enough… but as I’ve observed in other threads, Tim Tebow is NOT the first guy who…
- Played quarterback for the Florida Gators
- Won the Heisman Trophy
- Led the Gators to two national championship games, and one national title.
- Was a vocal born-again Christian
- Lacked the tools NFL teams generally want in a quarterback.
Danny Wuerffel’s style of play was different, but he had all those things in common with Tim.
So, did evangelical Christians demand that Wuerffel be drafted in round 1? Nope. Wuerffel was drafted in round 4, right about where he and Tebow both belonged, and everyone knew he was a project at best.
Did they buy millions of New Orleans Saints jerseys with Wuerffel’s name and number? Nope.
Did they insist he be made the Saints’ starting qb? No.
And did atheists start “I HATE WUERFFEL” websites, or make snarky remarks about Wuerffel’s future as a gay porn star? Again, no!
For some reason, both devout Baptists and Richard Dawkins fans were able to look at Danny Wuerffel rationally and see him for exactly what he was: a nice kid and a great college quarterback who probably didn’t have a future in the NFL.
I’ve never understood why Tebow’s fans and detractors alike couldn’t assess him in a similarly rational way.
That’s it. Warner earned his respect through supreme accomplishments as a pro, with a story straight out of a young-readers’ book. He earned his right to show his piety, didn’t rub it in people’s faces to a any greater extent than the usual evangelical player, and stayed humble about that as well as every other part of his life.
Tebow made a huge error by seeming to play the star before he’d done anything as a pro, partly in participating in that anti-abortion Super Bowl com and partly in that “Tebowing” stuff (yes, it got popularized by others but it still started with him). Mostly unfairly, he got tagged as somebody who thought he was better than he was, wanted all of us to know it, and hadn’t earned the right to open his mouth as a pro. Yes, he’d earned that right in college, but that right stops right after the last game, and for most star college quarterbacks it stays stopped for good. The image he had is of the kind of person most people take great joy in seeing get their comeuppance.
I kind of feel bad for Tebow in a sense; he’s not really a loudmouth, a drama queen or anything of the sort; he seems remarkably low-key for someone with all this business swirling around him.
It’s like he’s a proxy for some larger argument about secularists vs. religiousists(?), instead of being a player worth all this noise.
He stands where the whole stadium can see him and demonstrates his piousness. That’s low-key?
I haven’t seen Tebow do his tebowing thing anywhere but the sideline. If he did it mid-field, you’d have a point. You don’t - because people kneel down on the sideline CONSTANTLY in professional sports. Hell - they do so at mid-field after nearly every single game, and you aren’t complaining about the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, you’re complaining about Tebow.
I’ll say it a couple more times: social media, social media, social media. And I do think Tebow was a big deal in some circles - particularly evangelical Christian ones - even before he became a star in college. The hype was just out of control. Danny Wuerffel never had this kind of exposure. Neither did Kurt Warner, who never made a Super Bowl commercial that I can remember but did actually play in the game three times. 
I don’t think either of them ever announced that they were saving themselves for marriage. But it’s worth pointing out that there have been athletes similar to Tebow before, if not at Tebow levels of attention and controversy. Every couple of years some athlete is anointed as the embodiment of purity and hard work in sports because he doesn’t have the most talent, but he has a good heart and a great work ethic and always listens to his coaches. That person is always white, but that’s a total coincidence.
While he’s not my favorite guy, this isn’t an accurate representation of what he did. It’s not even a “new” pose, players have been doing it for eons. If he didn’t have the name Tebow on his back no one would have even noticed.
But he registered a trademark and is claiming copyright.
Yeah, I bet he filed that paperwork personally, too.
I forgot about that. We can put that on the list of things Kurt Warner and Danny Wuerffel didn’t do. He wasn’t the first player to put a message in his eye black and maybe he wasn’t the first to put a Bible verse there, but I’m sure he was the first to make a thing out of putting a different verse there every week.
The copyright article doesn’t seem to be accurate - trademarks aren’t copyrights and I don’t think it’s possible to copyright a gesture. But it’s pretty silly to claim it as a trademark since players have been doing that move for decades. There’s clearly prior art. 
But it’s a pretty silly/lousy thing to do - not an action that would endear him to many folks who already are suspicious of his motives.