I have a confession to make, fellow St. Louis Rams fans and bystanders: I can't stop watching Tim Tebow destroy football. In my other life I'm a graduate student in Fort Collins, Colorado, which means I get every Denver Broncos game and every last whit of Tim Tebow fanaticism—stories about Tebowing, stories about how he's underrated, stories about how he's overrated, stories about how he's changing football and stories about how he's ruining it for everybody.
↵And after that blanket coverage, I've come to this conclusion: Tim Tebow almost certainly isn't a better quarterback prospect than Sam Bradford, but he and the media carnival he rides in on are absolutely more fun to watch.
↵So far as I can tell, Tebow has been competent at best as a quarterback in 2011, now that the Broncos have rolled back 90 years of football development to play to his strength (which, so far as I can tell, is running around like the Marx Brothers in the last scene of Horsefeathers.) He's a terrible passer, but in the few situations in which he's able to utilize his arm he nets a solid amount of yards per attempt and he doesn't turn the ball over.
↵The Broncos have won because of their defense, for the most part, but they're winning. And in the meantime, in one of the most risk-averse leagues in professional sports, we're having a conversation about what it means when a team decides to play a different sport from everyone else and has a surprising amount of success by doing it. (In this case, shirking St. Louis University's forward passing attack 100 years after the fact and playing football that looks like it belongs in an adaptation of This Side of Paradise.)
↵That, to me, is fascinating—as is watching a borderline quarterback spin away from three defenders and then rush for three yards, instead of tossing four-yard passes to his slot receiver all day. I don't know how long it will last, but I'm willing to put up with Tebow's cult of personality so long as it produces such an entertaining diversion in a football season that's offered little in the way of conventional consolation to Rams fans.
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