Hot Sprots Takes [sic]

The height of irony: Tim Tebow, who made a bigger deal of his faith than any athlete in recent memory, gets cut by the Jets on the same day that Jason Collins becomes the first active openly gay athlete in a Big Four league sport. No doubt this will be heralded as another sign of the apocalypse by the holy rollers and their enablers in the media.  Yet the thing people fail to grasp is this: people don’t hate Tim Tebow because of his faith, they hate Tim Tebow because ESPN was using the word “Tebow” 88 times an hour on Sportscenter in a year where he scored exactly as many NFL touchdowns as my wife did.  There has never been a bigger delta between hype and performance that I can remember – at least during Linsanity, another prominently Christian athlete was running up sick numbers for the Knicks.

The problem with the holy rollers is that by their logic, Tim Tebow is a God-fearing Christian man who takes every opportunity to witness and share the Word of God with his own testimony, and therefore the fact that in three years he delivered a turnover for every two touchdowns and averaged less than 50% complete passing is immaterial. And that’s not how the NFL works. Hell, that’s not how sports works.  People didn’t want Jackie Robinson in the major leagues at first, and then the Dodgers got really good really fast.  People didn’t want Alabama to field black players, but then they rattled off three national titles in the 1970s (and should have had a fourth).  People didn’t want an influx of Russians in the NHL, until they turned Detroit into the Death Star. 

Sports may be the only field of human endeavor where who you are becomes immaterial.  You a Muslim? You Chinese? You gay? You could be a blue-skinned mutant with two husbands, but if you go to Chicago, hit .450 with 80 home runs and lead the Cubs to World Series victory for the first time since 1908, you will be the god of the North Side for the rest of your breathing days.  I assure you that there will be a shrine in my living room to whoever delivers to Vanderbilt a national championship in football (and the aforementioned wife probably has wireframes for the corresponding shrine to whoever delivers Rose Bowl victory to Cal), and it’s not going to matter to me whether the guy was purple or Chinese or Baptist or whatever – he got the job done and we got the ring.

And ultimately that’s what did for Tim Tebow in the NFL. The only thing pro football wants from a quarterback on Sunday is 350 yards and 3 touchdowns.  Everything and anything else you might do on Sunday might score points with God, but those don’t show up on the scoreboards of the NATIONAL. FOOTBALL. LEAGUE.