by Sarah, Proud and Tall
Amount that I know about American football: Nothing
Percentage chance that I will, nonetheless, be right in assuming that Ross Douthat will sound like a total wanker when babbling on about Tebow: 100%
O ye of little faith. Did you think that the Lord God of Hosts, having raised Tebow up as a Gideon of the gridiron, would pass up the opportunity to put his faithful servant to the test? Did you think that the angelic screenwriters responsible for scripting last year’s succession of Tebow-related improbabilities had nodded off after the Broncos were dispatched in the A.F.C. playoffs? Did you think that the archons and demiurges who preside over America’s culture war would be content to let Tebow fade into obscurity — some red-state-friendly endorsement deals, a few 6-10 finishes, and then early retirement and a lifetime of under-the-radar charity work?
Above all, did you think that Tebow himself, with his distinctive mix of missionary zeal and “give me the ball” confidence, would duck the Gotham opportunity? That he would pull a LeBron James and take his talents down to Florida instead?
No, this was where the Tebow story was always destined to end up. Denver was his Galilee; New York will be the Roman Colosseum. Or to be pop cultural rather than scriptural: Denver was District 12 in Suzanne Collins’s Panem, and the Meadowlands will be the Hunger Games arena.
Shoot me now.
Knight of Nothing
Whose idea was it to center justify all of the text? It looks terrible.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Holy shit, that’s some serious stupidity.
Mark S.
That’s a pretty damn weird argument. I don’t really know what it means, except that no matter what happens, that just proves that God exists.
dead existentialist
I hope Detroit’s not on the schedule.
trollhattan
What will it take to get Tebow in a Reese Witherspoon wig and heels?
Parmenides
what the fuck is he talking about. Tebow is not a great football player. Hell have his success last year was that defenses where gassed playing in denver by the fourth. This reminds me of the time when he said that the he was rooting for Palin more than any politiction before.
Roger Moore
@Mark S.:
Yup. It’s just like the conspiracy theorists who see absence of evidence for the conspiracy as proof of a coverup. Things turning out as expected is proof that God is clearing your path for you. Problems are proof that God is testing your strength and faith.
danielx
Tebow is not being put to the test, he hath been weighed in the balance and found wanting. If not, he wouldn’t have been traded for $2.5 mil and 4th and 6th round draft picks. Compare and contrast: Peyton Manning gets $95 mil over five years. Here’s your thirty pieces of silver and then some. Jeebus may love Tebow, but the NFL? Not so much…
Spaghetti Lee
Or to be pop cultural rather than scriptural: Denver was District 12 in Suzanne Collins’s Panem, and the Meadowlands will be the Hunger Games arena.
“Hey guys! Watch me be relevant!”
KG
I know I shouldn’t say this out loud, but… I’m putting the over/under on Tebow ending up on the back page coming out of a gay bar at week 6. Actually, I doubt Tebow is gay, I just want to see heads explode.
As for his football skills, give him receivers that an catch the ball and spread the field, and I’ll bet he will be ok. Or he will be dead from a blindside sack
Merp
If I were trying to write the most bone-headed, stereotypical, head-up-my-ass-and-taking-a-big-whiff paean to Tebow from a Christian perspective, I don’t think I could top what the Times published. Doesn’t he style himself some sort of intellectual? How the balls can what he wrote be less sophisticated and more “onward Christian soldiers!”?
Jesus.
Comrade Mary
Serious question for you sports geeks: is anyone playing the equivalent of Moneyball in football, or is every single team overpaying for overhyped undertalent?
Andy
I had also forgotten about Jesus’s undefeated Colosseum career. Had He made it to Rome, I’m sure He would’ve been Huge. There aren’t many fighters who can kill their opponents and then bring them back to life. I see Jesus as a trident and net man (He’s so lithe), but He was a carpenter, presumably a beefy dude, so maybe murmillo? At least in Douthat’s sweaty imaginings?
David Koch
Santorum screams at NYT reporter for quoting him.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/santorum-worst-republican-angry-at-media.html
Bnut
@Comrade Mary: It’s a bit of a different situation. In baseball, development of players takes more time (there are very few big league ready players right out of college/HS). Shelf life for football players is so much shorter, you almost have to go big or go home. There are surprises here and there, but for the most part, football players are a known commodity either right of of college or in the first few years of a career. That being said, there are def. sabremetrics used in football, but they are more play oriented as opposed to player oriented. If coaches really used the stats, there would be more going for it on 4th down, more onside kicks, more short passes. But football front offices have not embraced it as much as those in baseball.
newhavenguy
Ugh. Predictably awful. There’s enough wingnut welfare out there, why the Times have to chip in? If you need an Evil perspective on the op-ed page, Frum can at least write.
OTOH I hate the Jets, so I am busy rejoicing right now. I know NFL football is as indefensible as boxing, but I still love it and follow it. An awful move on so many levels for the Jets. I mean, really, can you imagine Tebow having a conversation with Rex Ryan? How is that gonna go? LOL. Love it.
That Old Gray Lady? Hard to love over the last 15 years or so. I don’t love seeing a decent newspaper turn to shit.
Seanly
I love when folks write about sports & sound like some 19th century wordy twit.
Also, re: Tebow –
1) He sucks as an NFL QB. Not all good college players are going to be good NFL players.
2) He’s not the only Christian player. Phillip Rivers is a big time Christian. I’m sure there are a lot more.
3) Every setback that Tebow suffers is not some trial by god. It’s called life. Nor is every great pass a miracle.
Roger Moore
@KG:
If you can find a bunch of receivers who can catch the ball the way Tebow throws it, and you’ll have something. Find some who can consistently get wide enough open so Tebow can go through his glacier slow release and get one of his dying quail throws there before the defender does, and you might have a working scheme for an offense. Of course, you could imagine what those same receivers could do with a good thrower in the backfield, and you’ll wonder why anyone would want Tebow.
Comrade Mary
@Bnut: Ah — thanks! I’d forgotten the correct term “sabermetrics”. (autocorrect just turned the last term into “Dante strive”. Sometimes this device approaches poetry.)
Yutsano
Men in tight pants embracing each other and bouncing around an elongated inflated sphere. The rest is pretty much fluff.
The term for this is sucker’s bet. I’m nowhere near that easily fooled.
Suffern ACE
Everyone pretend that Kurt Warner is John the Baptist now! Or was he St. Paul? Also, let Ross know that if Tebow wins, it is proof that Catholicism is a false cult and God favorites are pentacostals. I am assuming that the galilee – Rome analogy is to Peter, although I think Tebow would have needed to make a stop in Miami first as kind of a Jerusalem equivalent US city.
newhavenguy
@Seanly: Uh, yes. Interesting though that Tebow is the rally point as opposed to every other player who thanks god for 100 rushing yards or a touchdown. DoucheHat praised Timmeh a few months ago for daring to be openly Christian as an athlete. Imagine that. Also: Worst. Fit. Ever. Love it. Hate Jets, worse than the New York Yankees even.
Ferd of the Nort
Good heavens. I suspect Mr. Douthat has experienced a second cuming.
He has certainly messed the sheets.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Andy: And if his Coliseum career had flopped, the Roman press would have crucified him.
Rowan Atkinson’s “The Amazing Jesus of Nazareth” fits well here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YChMyONPMQU&feature=fvsr
Merp
@Comrade Mary: it’s complicated.
Moneyballing is essentially developing a theory of how to contend with players that have undervalued skills, use advanced statistical methods to find those players, acquire them at a discount, and try to win.
Each step of that process is much more complicated in football than baseball.
Because coaching jobs are more competitive, NFL coaches face swifter consequences if their new theories don’t work out, so that creates less of an incentive to try to find unorthodox strategies to win.
Using statistical techniques to identify undervalued skills and determine how individual players influence the game is much more difficult in football, because the dataset is much smaller and there are hundreds of more confounding variables.
Acquiring players is more difficult in the NFL, because the players union is much weaker. NFL teams are run much more like fiefdoms than MLB teams so there are more hurdles to navigate. And, because of the high personnel turnover for both players and coaches, even if someone had the perfect scheme getting all the players to implement it at the same time is much more difficult.
But, even given all of that, there are historic and current examples of NFL teams moneyballing. In the early days of the league the owner and de facto GM of the Oakland Raiders, Al Davis, determined that the racism of most of the rest of the league prevented them from evaluating black players properly (mostly, I think, by discounting clearly superior black athletes because of concerns about their intelligence). Davis said to hell with that and tried to acquire the best black athletes he could possibly get. The John Madden-coached teams of that era are widely considered to be among the best to ever play. Problem is, he kept on pursuing that strategy until his death a few years ago, and you can guess the result: as that form of racism was stamped out across the league, black athletes ceased being discounted in a way that Davis’ method could take advantage. The Raiders have been also-rans for the better part of the last two decades as a result.
As far as current teams go, a few years ago the Dolphins had only mediocre options at the QB position. So they ran the “wildcat”, an offense that uses an extra running back instead of a QB, a good portion of the time and had much better success than they probably would have had playing their mediocre QBs in a traditional offense. In addition, the college game has been revolutionized with offenses that use unconventional QB tactics. (A Mr. Tebow flourished in such an offense).
All this has created a climate where coaches are not punished as swiftly for trying these QB variations, because the potential benefits are so obvious. So you have the Eagles willing to risk a lot of dough and PR to give Michael Vick a shot, and a young coach in Denver rolling the dice with a high draft pick for Tebow, and a good portion of teams at least running the wildcat a few plays a game.
Whether this is more than a passing fad, though, remains to be seen. The wildcat fad is on its last legs because defenses have figured out how to stop it, for the most part. The teams that go deep in the playoffs have usually had QBs who play exceptionally well in a traditional offense, with the result that the old ways are still thought to be the best. Most teams are pursuing traditional QBs, but a few are flirting with new strategies. We’ll see.
Other positions have innovations here and there, but are either hard to implement or are so successful that they become the dominant strategy pretty quickly. Big and fast tight ends who play an integral part of the offense are a pretty recent development, but most every team is on the lookout for them now. There’s a fair amount of variety in defensive strategy, but acquiring all the pieces to make a pure version of a particular strategy is rare.
This is at least 1500 words longer than it should be, probably.
Silver
Do none of these Jesus-felllating players and their sycophants realize they work on the sabbath day?
kth
Memo to Douthat: the Jets have a solid starting QB, Mark Sanchez, whom Tebow has little hope of supplanting. I would not be surprised if Tebow did not begin the 2012 season with the NY Jets, in fact will be quite surprised if he lasts the entire season there (mainly because there are teams more desperate for whatever Tebow brings to the table than the Jets are).
It occurs to me that Tebow could become the Sarah Palin of sports, with his supporters constantly attributing his failures to the liberal biases of football coaches and executives. But it’s hard to imagine that act going over in NYC; I’m thinking Nashville might have been a better demo (especially as Matt Hasselbeck is probably pushing 40 by now).
Suffern ACE
Honestly, the only thing I can think of here is that chunky bobo needed to get this column out here before Brooks did. Let us now compare linsanity to trebowmania. I say golden state is a lot more like Galilee than Denver is. Denver is more Alexandria without the library. So maybe Denver is Antioch. And Tebow is St. Jerome bringing his translation of God’s own play book to the heathens. Lin in this story is probably St. Titus.
Some Loser
@Silver: Football is a game, not work. Just grown men playing a game for millions of dollar.
Bnut
@Merp: I would add that there are 22 men on a football field at one time. This is far more variables than a typical baseball play, which for the majority of the time involves just 2 players.
Yutsano
@Bnut: In football on any one play there is a primary, a secondary, and a tertiary method of advancing the ball. Since the defence is unaware of which exact stratagem is about to be deployed, they must anticipate whatever variables the offence throws in. Not to mention really good players can adapt on the fly. The best you can do is get someone as adaptable as possible. Timmeh ain’t that. But anyone with half a brain realized that during his Florida days.
Death Panel Truck
@Andy: Jesus would have totally been MVP of Super Bowl -MCMXXXVII.
Bnut
@Yutsano: Roll Tide.
Comrade Mary
@Merp: Wow. No, that wasn’t too long and I read all of it — thanks! I may actually have to start watching football now.
Jebediah
@Bnut:
Hey – just in case you are dying to hear my two cents about your motorcycle choice, that I plopped down at the end of the dead thread the other night.
ETA: No, I don’t know why you would.
Yutsano
@Comrade Mary: Really in a way it’s chess with live pieces and injuries. But a shit ton more improvisation. And even the best planned stratagem can fall apart almost instantly. I think these are the facts that suck me in. :)
@Bnut: Heh. It always makes me happy when you see what I did there.
Bnut
@Jebediah: Thanks. I’m going to check that Rebel out Wednesday. Have a long checklist for the inspection. And yeah, all equipment, all the time.
Jebediah
@Bnut:
Cool! Have fun, be safe, and if you decide to upgrade to an MV Augusta F3 but then you really don’t like it, I’ll buy it from you for SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS.
amk
baby jesus now in football too? peak wingnut never arrives ?
daverave
Good start to the locker room chemistry:
http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/blog/eye-on-football/18040940/report-several-current-jets-not-happy-about-tim-tebow-to-new-york-trade
joeyess
Hey, Douchehat, he didn’t have a fucking choice in the matter. He. Was. Fucking. Traded.
If he wanted to keep playing football in the NFL, he has to go where his owners send him.
What an asshat.
Emdee
Now, which part of scripture is it that mentions the Roman Colosseum again?
Emdee
Now, which part of scripture is it that mentions the Roman Colosseum again?
Narcissus
Douthat is the most boring person on the face of the earth. How do people get jobs sharing their opinions when their opinions put me to sleep
samara morgan
@amk: dude.
you know there is no sucha thing as peak wingnut.
there is only the wingularity.
and its near.
Bnut
@Narcissus: It’s pretty sad isn’t it? All of them, so predictable. Oooo, that would be fun, have a BJ contest where we all have to write a paragraph pretending to be a different columnist. Everyone has to guess who we are. Brooks would be easiest, Friedman also easy.
the farmer
for the sake of crosseyed jeezis!
text-align: left;
please.
*
pat
Pleeeeze bring back left-aligned text and the name of the poster at the top of the post, and a previous post, next post at teh end of teh comments.
thanks ever so much
Johannes
On behalf of Christians everywhere (ok, Episcopalians), I apologize for our role in creating Douthat’s bizarro preconceptions, obsessions, and his special li’l boy logic. (He’s still looking for the pony, by the way.)
Egg Berry
What the hell does that even mean?
BruceFromOhio
If author and subject both get fed to lions, this works just fine for me.
BruceFromOhio
@Egg Berry: The Archons were the guys with the long tubes from that one Star Trek episode where people were controlled by a computer, and every once in awhile went bonkers screaming “Festival! Festival!”.
I had no idea they were here ‘presiding over America’s culture war,’ that is so cool.
“Landru, guide us!”
Scotty
Defining Tebow by his religion is what drives me nuts. My take is that religion should be a private function of one’s life and should not be publicly flaunted like Tebow does. How many other people do you know of who drop down and pray while doing their job? I’m a teacher, what would I have to deal with if I was to drop down on a knee and pray for a few seconds before each class that I taught, or a parent-teacher conference, or in front of all my classes the second before they took their state tests?
nota bene
Everything Merp said is right, but I think there’s one really important point missing, which is that the NFL has a salary cap, and MLB does not. Nobody in the NFL is able to have a vast budgetary advantage over other teams the way the Yankees/Red Sox do. (Although just spending tons of money is no guarantee of success; see also the Cubs, Dodgers, Mets….)
Regarding Tebow: dude is 6’2″ 240, runs reasonably well with the ball, can’t throw worth a shit, and can’t read defenses well enough (or quickly enough). Last season aside, he is just not cut out to be a starting NFL QB.
IMHO Rex Ryan should take a stab at converting Tebow to tight end. As long as he can learn to block, in theory he’s athletic enough to be able to make that transition and actually be pretty good. NYT columnists don’t write about TEs very often though.
FWIW I don’t think Sanchez is very good, but Tebow makes him look like Tom Brady.
honus
Because if there is anything that Jesus was about, it is victory on the playing field.
ppcli
@Seanly: “Nor is every great pass a miracle.”
Well, in Tebow’s case, if he ever throws a great pass, it will be a miracle.
ppcli
“would duck the Gotham opportunity?”
Style point for Douthat: never use the word “duck” in connection with Tebow. It reminds people that his passes look like wounded ones.
Schlemizel
@Bnut:
Well, 3 really. The ball would just roll to the backstop if the catcher wasn’t there to prevent that 70-80% of the time. 8-{D
Uncle Cosmo
@ppcli:
How soon they forget. (Or, in Pittsburgh: How deeply they repress the memory. :p)
D-Notice
It’s just rugby with padding
RSA
Chunky Bobo:
Dude, you don’t get to choose.
butler
@D-Notice:
And, you know, the forward pass. And commercials.
Tone In DC
@RSA:
LULz.
redshirt
Belichek deploys some non-traditional scouting tactics – for instance, he’s looking for players able and/or willing to play multiple positions, which is a rarity on most NFL squads.
PurpleGirl
Some sportscommentator (I missed the name) said he thought Tebow (paraphrase) “should live in New Jersey because if he lived in NYC he would be too tempted by the nightlife and culture”. I didn’t hear if he said anything about falling into “SIN”. Really? New Jersey, the suburban home of the Mafia? Home of gambling casi-nos and related vice?
Ash Can
Fixt. Tebow was traded for a fourth-round draft choice. He’s a back-up quarterback and will spend most of his time on the bench. Which is as it should be.
daveNYC
@Suffern ACE:
Thing about Warner was that he always seemed to be a pretty humble guy, and he really seemed to walk the walk, in addition to talking the talk.
I also don’t remember anyone making any sort of a big deal about his religeon when he was on the Rams or Cardinals. It was mentioned in some of the fluff pieces about him, but really as a bit of background. I think a bigger deal was made about his stockboy background and his wife and kids.
Plus you have to admire the fact that he retired from the game, instead of going out there for another season or two and wasting the teams money while getting physically broken.
Thatgaljill
Oh, GAG! I couldn’t care less about Tebow’s faith. It’s the freakin’ crying I can’t get over. UGH… May the Force be with Mark Sanchez!
lethargytartare
@Uncle Cosmo:
he wound up like he was throwing a javelin and threw the pass about 10 yards late.
try again.