Peyton Manning Bobblehead Getting Awfully Tired of All the Jokes

 

“Come on, guys, it’s not funny anymore,” comes the muffled voice of
Manning’s head, which has probably rolled under the bed or something,
barely audible over the hard laughter of bad people.

 

What Do I Tell My Kid?

While the rest of the football world busily argues whether John Elway is a genius for paying $96 million to an immobile thirty-six-year-old man with a broken neck, or a fool for trading away a younger man whose completion percentage was not up to the exacting number we demand from a random coin flip, some thoughtful American parents are concerned with more weighty subjects: namely, how the trade of Tim Tebow to the New York Jets will ruin childhood everywhere, for everybody:

“The first victim of the Tebow trade: The [f]ans (and my children). . . . But with the magic of Tebow gone from Mile [H]igh so do most of the viewers and readers [editor’s note: huh?]. . . . I see it in my children[’s] eyes (w/tears).” —Iporeh, Denver Post message boards, March 21, 2012. (Edited both to be more grammatical and very slightly more disjointed.)

“My little boy[’]s heart is broken that Tebow is gone. What do I tell him that He¹ [we’re pretty sure the author is referring to Tebow here, rather than to his own son—ed.] took us to the playoffs and beat the Steelers and the front office hates him[?][Tebow, again, although we have it from a good source that the Broncos’ front office does indeed hate this guy’s kid—ed.]”—Broncosilver, Denver Post message boards, 3/21/12 

Refusing to offer parenting advice to strangers’ kids is a good rule of thumb,² and for the most part we follow it—telling others how to raise their children is condescending at best, usually insulting, and sure to be ignored.³ However, in this particular case, they did ask, so in the interest of raising your kids better than you can, we have faithfully compiled this list of potential

Things You Could Tell Your Kid About the Tebow Trade

• “Your favorite quarterback in the whole wide world isn’t very good.”

• “There’s nothing in the world more important than loyalty. We’ve been Broncos fans for years and years, ever since Tebow was drafted, but John Elway didn’t show him any loyalty, and that’s very disappointing. We’re so mad at him for his lack of loyalty that we’re Jets fans now.”

• “If you can look back at your childhood and say that this was your biggest disappointment, either you’re a very lucky kid—which is great—or you’re in for a terrible shock when your helicopter parents eject you into the real world. But don’t worry, we’ll never let that happen.”

• “You were gonna find this out sooner or later, son: life is shitty.”⁴

• “John Elway got jealous of Tebow’s popularity, so he replaced Tebow with one of the most accomplished and popular quarterbacks of the last twenty years. I know you don’t believe this, because only a child would believe something this silly, but sometimes we say dumb things that we want to believe.”

• “We never told you this before, but football games don’t actually start in the fourth quarter. We’ve been fast-forwarding past all the unwatchable parts.”

We sincerely hope some combination of the above phrases helps you through your child’s brief and easily forgotten time of grief.



That said, though, we would be failing in our responsibility as your kids’ surrogate parents if we didn’t bring this up: quite frankly, we question your desire to protect your children. If you really, truly cared about shielding your beloved children from crushing disappointment,

why on Earth did you allow them to be Broncos fans in the first place?
 
 

NOTES
1. A lesser blog might dwell for paragraph after hyperbolic paragraph on the religious significance and/or impropriety of the author’s deifying capitalization of “he” in reference to Tim Tebow. But we—being decent, kindhearted folk always willing to see the best in people—are going to take the high road here, and assume that this was just an honest mistake made by somebody stupid.
2. The phrase “rule of thumb,” incidentally, has nothing to do with legalized wife-beating, no matter what your more gullible friends may have told you.
3. And God help them if our advice isn’t ignored.
4. Recommended only for shitty parents.

Broncos Rookie Linebacker Von Miller Wins Prestigious Steve Urkel Impression Award

 

Miller’s prize-winning performance.

“Rookie of the Year? Yawn. When he single-handedly
saves a floundering sitcom by making it
twice as stupid, maybe I’ll be impressed.”

God Indifferent to Football; Satan Still Heavily Invested

Armchair philosophers have argued for years, often with nobody in particular paying attention to them, that God doesn’t care who wins or loses a football game. With a balanced mix of the devout, the disinterested, and the despicable on both sides of the ball—not to mention the long list of actually important problems on Earth to occupy God’s time—the notion that God notices, much less intervenes in, an essentially irrelevant athletic activity played by maybe 0.06% of the world’s population is a pretty silly one to a lot of folks.¹

On the other hand, though, one should probably be forgiven for believing that Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots—having won the AFC East nine times since 2001, and now being one win away from reaching their fifth Super Bowl in eleven seasons—are proof that Satan is heavily invested in the NFL, and hasn’t lost his touch.

Sherman: Brother Dickinson, New England has been fighting the devil for more than a hundred years.
Dickinson: And as of now, Brother Sherman, the devil has been winning hands down.²

NOTES
1. That doesn’t mean, of course, that plenty of folks won’t still make the argument.
2. From 1776 (1976), John Dickinson to Roger Sherman.

Glitchy “Tim TiVo” Device Still Immensely Popular

 

It knows what kind of show you want to see, and it’s
obviously running the whole time, but it only
starts working right with about five minutes to go. 

This is You Taking the National Football League Far, Far Too Seriously

 

 

What can we say about bearded men dressed as women dressed as pigs—
dressed as beauty-pageant contestants—that hasn’t already been said?
Something, probably, but we’re damned if we can think of what it might be.

 

Show us a pimp that’s actually a Bengals fan,
and we'll show you the world’s crappiest pimp.

 

Hulkamania still lives on in certain parts of the frozen American north.

 

No, really, he isn’t, he’s just a football player.
Although a tight spiral coming from the Broncos’
backfield could be considered a miracle.

 

Q: What’s more intimidating than Dolphins? A: Creepy clowns.

Q: What’s more intimidating than creepy clowns? A: Everything else.

 

Hey, the whistles are our favorite part of the game too.

 

Hell no, we’re not going to make fun of the Barrel Man. The guy was a
Colorado institution. That little leprechaun dude, on the other hand. . . . 

  

. . . yeah, he kind of creeps us out.

Raiders fans have been a bit listless, even depressed,

ever since Frodo destroyed the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom.

Tebow Now 4-0 in Alternate Universe

With a 45-10 loss to the Detroit Lions on Sunday, October 30, 2011, extremely popular Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow improved to 4-0 in the intangible-heavy and unorthodox alternate universe where a large minority of his fan base appears to reside.

Bowling in the Dark’s sports correspondent recently met with the Ambassador to the United States from Tebow Nation—this unusual universe’s densest populated country—to discuss the differences between their reality and our more mundane and conventional one. While we didn’t catch his name, which was spoken too quickly and excitedly to be understood, he showed a heartwarming disdain for formality by suggesting we call him by his nickname, #TBo_4EVA_GoGatorsGo:


INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Q: In Tebow’s first game of the season, against the San Diego Chargers, he replaced an ineffective Kyle Orton after halftime and led the Broncos to fourteen fourth-quarter points, but still lost 29-24. Doesn’t that count as a loss?
A: Tim Tebow won that game because he’s a winner. Kyle Orton lost it. There’s no way the Broncos lose that one if Tebow plays the whole game, I guarantee it.

Q: What?
A: I personally guarantee that Tebow would have won that game.

Q: If I understand you correctly, you’re personally guaranteeing something that’s not only very, very unlikely but, in fact—having already not happened—can’t ever actually happen?
A: What kind of fan would I be if I couldn’t guarantee something like that? We do it on message boards all the time.

[long pause as interviewer collects himself]

Q: Official statistics indicate that Tebow missed on sixty percent of his passes against the Chargers, and passed for less than eighty yards. Aren’t those the kind of numbers one would expect from a quarterback who’s not ready to play at the professional level, where a good quarterback generally completes around 60% of his passes?
A: Well, you see, the NFL is a league built on passing, so the ability to throw is overrated. Think about it—how many times did “great passers” like Joe Montana, John Elway, Jim Kelly, or Tom Brady lead their teams to the Super Bowl?

Q: Eighteen. They went to eighteen Super Bowls.
A: Actually, what I asked was how many Heisman Trophies they won.

Q: Well, you’ve got me there. But don’t Heisman-winning quarterbacks usually struggle to succeed in the NFL, if they even make it into the league in the first place? I’m thinking here of Charlie Ward, Andre Ware, Gino Torretta, Jason White, Eric Crouch, Chris Weinke, Danny Wuerffel, Ty Detmer, and Matt Leinart, to name a few.
A: I’m pretty sure none of these guys actually existed.

Q: Well, that kind of supports my point.
A: Simply put, Tim Tebow is the most successful Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback since Cam Newton.

Q: But didn’t Cam Newton win the Heisman after Tebow?
A: Next question please.

Q: After the 24-29, er, win against San Diego, the Broncos announced Tebow as their starter. The team then had a bye week. [For those of you unfamiliar with football or even basic sporting terminology, that means they didn’t play at all.] Our sources say that you’re counting that Sunday off as another win.
A: Indeed we are. If Kyle Orton had been the starter that didn’t play that week, he would have found a way to lose the game that didn’t happen. So Tim Tebow, who is a winner, won that game that didn’t get played, by preventing Kyle Orton from not losing it. Tim Tebow is a winner. He wins games.

Q: Even games he doesn’t play?
A: Especially those games. Tim Tebow went 1,378-3 at Florida in games he didn’t play.

Q: Moving on to the Miami game, then . . . in this case, we all can agree that the Denver Broncos scored a legitimate win, 18-15 in Miami.
A: Yes. We’re thinking about counting that one twice.

Q: It’s been observed—for example, by us—that for the vast majority of that game, the Broncos’ offense looked awful, with Tebow going 4-for-14 for 40 yards. His comeback was impressive, of course, but it’s hard to believe the Broncos would have needed such a thrilling and improbable last-second comeback if their offense had been even marginally competent in some of the game’s earlier seconds.
A: He would have looked better if the play-calling hadn’t been so conservative.

Q: So he missed ten of his first fourteen passes—some of them very badly—because the plays called were too rudimentary?
A: Well when you put it that way, it sounds bad. The problem is that Elway is jealous of Tebow’s popularity, and doesn’t want to see him succeed.

Q: What about the wide-open receivers that he didn’t see in the first fifty-five minutes of the game? Was Elway hiding them?
A: He didn’t need to see them until Tebow Time. You’re not clutch if you bother to succeed early on. That’d be like Scotty fixing the Enterprise only as fast as he said he could.

Q: And isn’t Miami one of the worst teams in the league? Shouldn’t even a young, raw, inexperienced quarterback have had a better overall showing against some of the weakest competition to be found?
A: If Miami were such a bad team, why were they in the lead for most of the game?

Q: Well—
A: We had to go into overtime to beat them, so they're clearly much better than you think. It was great to see Matt Tebow kick the game-winning field goal after missing the two earlier ones.

Q: Matt Prater?
A: I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.

To be fair, many other Denver Broncos looked bad today too.

Q: Never mind. I’d say that one of Tebow’s obvious tangible strengths is his running ability.
A: Yep, he’s much more mobile than Kyle Orton. A quarterback with a questionable offensive line need the ability to move in the pocket to avoid sacks.

Q: Agreed. But Orton was sacked nine times in five games, whereas Tebow was sacked six times by the Dolphins, and then another seven by the Lions. Doesn’t that suggest that Tebow’s slow release and poor field vision are as problematic as Orton’s immobility, perhaps even more so?
A: No, you don’t get it. Tim Tebow’s mobility allows him to escape sacks. Plus, he has intangibles.

Q: But—
A: [Plugging ears with fingers] Intangibles! Intangibles! INTANGIBLES! INTANGIBLES!

[several minutes later]

A: Clearly you’re just a hater.

Q: So you’d call objective analysis of a player’s strengths and weaknesses “hating”?
A: What would you call it?

Q: Offhand, probably “objective analysis of a player’s strengths and weaknesses.”
A: Hater. Go drink some Haterade, hater.

Q: Be honest, did you even follow the Denver Broncos before they drafted Tim Tebow?
A: I would have, if they’d even existed back then.

At this point our intrepid interviewer suddenly developed a piercing headache, and decided to go home.

Nobody knows how long—or why—the enthusiasm for Denver’s newest quarterback will continue, but we do know for sure that Tebow Nation looks forward to next week’s certain victory against the Island of the Misfit Toys.

Don't let the rosy cheeks fool you—Charlie-in-the-Box is
a ruthless pass rusher and one mean son of a bitch.

Tim Tebow Proves Both His Harshest Critics and Looniest Supporters Absolutely Correct

Tim Tebow in action against the Miami Dolphins,
mercifully not trying to throw the ball.

Sunday, October 23, 2011—In a display perhaps more dazzling than the Denver Broncos’ improbable fourth-quarter comeback against the still-winless Miami Dolphins, new Broncos starting quarterback Tim Tebow managed to simultaneously fuel the angry, spittle-filled arguments of both his most vocal critics and his most stalwart, possibly unhinged supporters.

Kyle Orton at full sprint.

Tebow, until very recently the most popular third-string quarterback in the history of the universe, spent ninety percent of the game showing his detractors why he’s still several years away from being an NFL-ready quarterback.

Despite being far more mobile than previous starter Kyle Orton (right), Tebow absorbed seven sacks on the day from a defense that had only eight sacks in its previous six games. With 54:37 elapsed in the game, Tebow had managed only a dismal 4 completions on 14 passes for 40 yards, and the Broncos were on the verge of being shut out for the first time in almost twenty years.

This performance came against a last-place Dolphins team lacking a pass defense—a team for whom the Broncos’ offense had had an extra seven days to prepare thanks to their bye week. Tebow critics were quick but not wrong to note that few teams the Broncos will face for the remainder of this season—or perhaps any season—will be of the Dolphins’ caliber, unless they can schedule a game or two against the PAC-12’s CU Buffaloes.

In the last five-plus minutes of the game, however, Tebow showed his giddy legion of breathlessly optimistic supporters that the inability to be better at quarterbacking the lightly-regarded Orton or the barely-regarded Brady Quinn apparently has no actual bearing on how good one is at quarterbacking, engineering two scoring drives, going 9-for-13 with 121 passing yards and two touchdowns, and showing a thrilling ability to create plays by darting out of a collapsing pocket without necessarily seeing wide-open receivers.

Tebow also scored the game-tying two-point conversion by convincing the Dolphins’ defense that they shouldn’t expect a guy who rushed for almost 3,000 yards and 57 touchdowns in college—and has one of the most suspect arms in the NFL this side of Jason Campbell—wasn’t likely to try to run into the end zone. It is not known at this time whether Tebow is the first NFL quarterback with actual hypnotic powers.

Befuddled Denver fans, hoping to remember witnessing another such improbable combination of simultaneous athletic excellence and utter incompetence, had to think all the way back to January 31, 1988, when a Broncos team led by Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway leapt out to a 10-0 first-quarter lead over the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XXII, only to have nothing else of consequence happen the entire game—especially not in the second quarter.


Despite the uncertainty swirling around Tebow’s play, the gloom of another lost football season in the Mile High City, and the yawning, mostly Tebow-induced gulf dividing the Broncos’ dedicated and emotional fans, a few things can be said for certain: Tebow has or has not proven, without a doubt, that he can play quarterback at the highest level; the Broncos have or haven’t found their leader of the future; the otherwise somewhat unpopular Josh McDaniels’s drafting of Tebow was, or perhaps wasn’t, an act of unqualified genius; and if the team can find a way to play only the worst teams in the conference, they will or won’t sometimes actually barely win, once in a while, in overtime.

And for Denver Broncos fans, that is or isn’t enough.¹

NOTES

1. We stand by this statement.²
2. Or we don’t.

Think Like a Denver Broncos Fan!

 Disclaimer: We Do Not Actually Recommend Trying This, and Cannot be Held Liable for Damages if You Succeed.

  

Individual opinions vary widely, of course, and the Denver Broncos do in fact have a great many thoughtful, well-informed, and reasonable fans, so the title “Think Like a Denver Broncos Fan” is admittedly a touch misleading. Unfortunately, though, among a certain sector of Broncos fans—including but not limited to the kinds of folks who leave comments at denverpost.com and believe the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” is still clever instead of pathetically tiresome—the following school of thought is pervasive and most likely permanent.¹ 

It’s also an easy thought process to duplicate—one option is to bash yourself repeatedly in the face with a toaster oven; when you no longer can remember why your face hurts, stop, because you’re there. In case you’re interested in a less destructive option, though, simply convince yourself of the following:

1. Kyle Orton is the worst quarterback in the history of the universe.²
2. Brady Quinn is ten times worse than Kyle Orton.
3. Tim Tebow—according to numerous sources, most importantly the coaching staff that has scrutinized every minute of every drill, and every snap of every play, scrimmage, and game (both in person and in countless video reviews) and has a vested interest in using the absolute best players available at every position—is nowhere close to being as ready to play as either the infinitely terrible Kyle Orton or the even-more-terrible Brady Quinn.³

Therefore,
 

4. Tim Tebow is better than Kyle Orton or Brady Quinn, and should be the Broncos’ starting quarterback.

 
If you’ve spotted the minor logical mistake in the above, congratulations! Mentally speaking, you’re well ahead of a significant fraction of Denver Broncos fans, and easily on par with, say, a basset hound. If you haven’t spotted it, you should drop the toaster oven and lie down for a while. It’ll come to you eventually.

“Why come me face hurt?”

NOTES

1. “School of thought” probably isn’t the best phrase to use, as “school” implies learning and “thought” implies, well, thought.

2. To be fair, we have to admit the possibility that this could be true. But the universe is an awfully big place, and it still has Ryan Leaf in it. 
3. You may have noticed that here in item #3, we’ve craftily used what could best be described as “facts as reported by virtually every football expert everywhere” rather than “toaster-oven-induced opinion.”

QB Tebow Stars in Least Offensive Commercial in Super Bowl History

Thousands of American viewers offended.