Irrelevance May Finally Be Catching Up with Tebowmania
PHILADELPHIA — Welcome to the first-ever Chip Kelly-Tim Tebow press conference. Chip Kelly and Tim Tebow will not be in attendance.
The most fascinating head coach/general manager in the NFL signed the most famous backup quarterback in the history of Western Civilization on Monday. But the only person in the Eagles organization available to speak to the media this week was new vice president of player personnel Ed Marynowitz.
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"So ya thought ya might like to go to the show!/To feel the warm thrill of confusion, that space cadet glow!" Marynowitz said as he stepped to the podium Thursday.
No, that didn't actually happen. Marynowitz, Kelly's fresh-faced 30-year-old lieutenant, was as polite, personable and vague as any personnel executive twice his age. He was officially there to talk about the draft, not the Tebow. This was a regularly scheduled media session, not a five-alarm Tebow infrared alert.
But a few Floydian hallucinations are just part of the Kelly-Tebow experience. Kelly press conferences have grown contentious lately. Tebow pressers come with jugglers and bearded ladies. Marynowitz's inaugural media session, by contrast, was like a board meeting at an accounting firm.
Twenty minutes elapsed, and no one asked a Tim Tebow question. Has the world finally stopped going crazy? Or was lack of craziness the real hallucination? After four years, three of them spectacularly uneventful, are we finally facing the heat-death of the Tim Tebow saga?
It's time to find out where you fans really stand.
Tebow Time is an endless Saturday at the kids' birthday pizza arcade with the creepy animatronics. Forget Five Nights at Freddy's; it's Five Years at Timmy's. Veteran sportswriters and television personalities become down-and-out college girls doing the happy hamster dance and telling runny-nosed preschoolers that this is the most wun-wun-wonderful experience of their lives. But the kids are sugar-rushing, hyperstimulated and just wise enough to see through the facade and realize the pizza tastes crummy and a million prize coupons won't even buy you a joy buzzer. Lots of strained smiles, lots of bubbly noise, all for fussing and tantrums and a vaguely unfulfilled feeling.
Twenty minutes and thirty seconds into his press conference, Ed Marynowitz fielded a question about Tim Tebow:
"We brought Tim in for a workout. Obviously, we were intrigued by what we saw there. We saw a player that had improved from the last time we saw him live, which was when he was here with New England. So we had some conversations and some discussions and felt that it was an opportunity to bring in someone that could compete for a spot.
We've got 68 players that are on our football team right now, and Tim's one of them, OK? So he'll have an opportunity to compete for a roster spot, and his role will be determined by his performance, and I think it's as simple as that.
"
It's never that simple, Ed Marynowitz. It has never been that simple.
In nightmares, 20 years have passed, and Tim Tebow is still in the NFL. He is a Doug Flutie or George Blanda, and his appearance on the field causes reflexive spasms of purple-prosed ecstasy in old sportswriters.
By then, I am an old sportswriter, though there is no writing anymore, just instantaneous brain-to-brain podcasting. I take my grandchild off my knee, engage the auto-column-broadcasto-publisho-processor permanently implanted in my cerebral cortex and begin dictating directly to the world. "Tim Tebow climbed from the bench and limped onto the field to the rapturous hosannas of an adoring Mexico City crowd. He accomplished in relief what rookie Camden Jack Cutler couldn't provide as a starter: a victory that prompted alleluias from weary Bills fans. Tebow completed two passes for 11 yards and stumbled forward for six more yards to set up a 56-yard field goal by Lu Chen Zendejas. After the game, Tebow received a congratulatory phone call from President Watt.
The Bills' next preseason game is against the Chargers in Mumbai."
The column/broadcast/GIFvineagram nets 450 million brainviews.
Marynowitz is both an important new personality on the Philadelphia sports scene and a figure of fascination for Eagles fans: the man behind the curtain, the wunderkind from local La Salle University, the last man standing when the guillotines fell silent during Kelly's Winter Revolution. The local media have many questions that do not involve the third-string quarterback.
"Everybody here in the organization is here to support his vision," Marynowitz said of Kelly, who now appears to wield the kind of power that would make King Nebuchadnezzar jealous. "That doesn't mean I'm going to agree with Chip. I know that's a common thing that gets thrown out: Is this guy just a yes man? I'm never one to agree just to agree."
Indeed, Marynowitz honed his executive chops under Nick Saban and, early in his brief-but-meteoric career, Bill Parcells. He said he feels comfortable going to the wall with his new boss. He said Kelly is seeking "checks and balances" from the new chain of command.
Kelly doesn't need Tim Tebow to generate intrigue. He can dominate a press conference without attending. Kelly has created an environment in which a writer can speculate about Marcus Mariota-Sam Bradford-Johnny Manziel trades and, instead of getting laughed into a dark corner of the Internet, get promoted on the front page. All this and Tebow too. An embarrassment of riches. If only the principals were speaking.
Perhaps Kelly wanted to send a no-big-deal message about the Tebow signing by putting Marynowitz in the spotlight. Maybe he is just sick of speaking to the Philly media after the March free-agent frenzy. Or perhaps he knows absence and silence just make him and his motivations even more fascinating.
Tebow Time is the life of a wedding DJ, playing the same songs over and over again for a thousand happy couples and families. Celebrate good times, because it's electric, boogie-oogie-oogie, and love is always and forever. Except that the wedding DJ has seen too many receptions, too many roaming-eyed grooms and bridezillas to be fooled, no matter how merrily the bridesmaids and grandmas tush-push. This is his fourth marriage, she can never be satisfied, and this one ain't gonna last through the summer.
I think about Tim Tebow many times while cooking in my kitchen. Tim Tebow helped renovate my kitchen.
I was a freelancer in 2011 and 2012, when Tebowmania went supernova. I had to pitch and peddle my wares back then to The New York Times, NBC Sports, ESPN the Magazine and other outlets. A buzzy player like Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees might get a quick return phone call. Tebow had editors outside my door with a portable battering ram. He generated enough income to let me splurge on cabinets and (non-granite) countertops.
People think some media members hold a grudge against Tim Tebow. How could I possibly hold a grudge against Tim Tebow? He was a one-man Internet snark stimulus package. I may not owe him my career, but I definitely owe him my garbage disposal.
Tebow mattered, for-real for-real, in the early spring of 2011. It's easy to forget that. His lucky streak of 16-13 and 13-10 victories looked downright miraculous even to me, and I read Michael Shermer books. He threw for 316 yards and two touchdowns in a playoff victory against the Steelers on January 8, 2012, just a couple of months before the Jets traded for him and the Tebow claxons sounded over Manhattan. There were a thousand reasons to be skeptical, but there was something to be skeptical about: video of something big and strange in Loch Ness, not just the village coot ranting about something he saw once from the steps of the tourist center.
There's nothing to talk about now. Tebow has not taken a meaningful snap since December 30, 2012. "Meaningful" is a relative term: Tebow played one snap in his final Jets game, handing off to Joe McKnight for two yards. Tebow last took the field at all in a Patriots preseason game on August 29, 2013, a game Ryan Mallett started while Tom Brady went pearl diving or curtain shopping or whatever. Tebow went 6-of-11 for 91 yards with two fourth-quarter-of-silly-time touchdowns. He only completed 36.7 percent of his passes that preseason, a fourth-year vet playing mostly fourth quarters in a high-percentage offense. Go figure.
There are no stats of relevance to review, no film of substance to grind. Heck, there's not even any religious/cultural/sociopolitical meat on the Tebow bone. Tebow has not spoken up for any causes, controversial or otherwise, during his 18 months of exile. He doesn't even tweet Bible verses to his 3 million followers that often anymore, something thousands of football personalities do each day. (Monsignor tells me that opening TweetDeck on Sunday morning does not absolve me from mass obligations, but he hasn't seen my TweetDeck on Sunday mornings). Tebow couldn't even bother to honor National Puppy Day in a timely manner, the monster:
Too little, too late Tim. And if that puppy is named Bronco, then he must be older now in dog years than you are in people years.
Which is precisely the problem.
Now we have a Tim Tebow-Chip Kelly press conference with no Tebow or Kelly. Maybe it's a sign that we have finally turned the corner on the spring and summer of 2012, when New York newspapers held emergency press conferences to coordinate coverage of the new backup quarterback, when Herm Edwards sang happy birthday to Tebow, when NFL Network launched NFL AM with a "Daily Tebow" segment.
I miss those days. And not just because I need a new microwave.
There were two Eagles press conferences on Thursday, one for print journalists and one for video. Marynowitz was asked again about Tebow when the television cameras were rolling. Compare this statement to his previous statement:
"We worked him out, and we saw improvement from the last time that we saw him. We had exposure to him live when he was with New England, when they practiced here. We worked him out, and we saw a great deal of improvement with him.
We've got 68 players on this roster right now. Tim's one of 68. So he'll have an opportunity to compete for a roster spot here. I've said this before, and this comes from Coach, his role will be determined by his performance. So, we're excited that he's a member of the organization and we're looking forward to him competing.
"
When it comes to deflating a Tebow balloon, it's important to stay on message. Really, tightly, precisely, redundantly on message. Marynowitz sounds a bit like a cop waving away lookie-loos with a "nothing to see here." But then again, there really isn't much to see here.
In nightmares, none of the people who swarm to read Tebow articles or watch Tebow programming are real. They are fake Twitter accounts, like the ones used to bolster a politician or celebrity's on-line presence, or they are Web crawlers, viruses and bots.
They were programmed to appear vaguely human on the Web. They retweet each other in a kind of echo chamber. They open links with dummy browsers. Some have achieved enough crude sentience to post comment thread messages using words like "butthurt." Their programming attracts them to celebrities like locusts to a harvest: Tim Tebow today, Justin Bieber tomorrow, whoever is trending on Monday. The bots and spiders drive editorial decisions, fool sponsors and advertisers, reshape the entire media economy just by buzzing mindlessly about, choosing the trite and silly while avoiding the unique and substantive.
And then, one day, the Tebowbots become self-aware. And they begin making demands.
Marynowitz deflects questions about top prospects like Marcus Peters and Jalen Collins. Local writers probe the Marynowitz-Kelly dynamic for insights. Nearly an hour of press conferences, roughly 90 seconds of Tebow. The world has turned right-side up.
It's Thursday morning at 11:30 a.m., just after the Eagles pressers. I check NFL.com's front page: no Tebow. I check Bleacher Report's front page: one tiny Tebow tile among dozens. ESPN, the giant that for two years screamed Tebow at the heart of a nation? Nothing on the main page.
News broke on Sunday night. It became official on Monday. Tebow-shaped pretzels were trending by Tuesday. I did radio until I was hoarse early in the week. But now a deputy general manager is droning about draft strategy and my colleagues have moved on to Marcus Mariota and Greg Hardy.
Is the Tebow Tale finally shrinking to something close to its appropriate size? And if so, why do I feel so bad about it?
Friends tell me that only the media are obsessed with Tim Tebow; they say it as if they think I can then waltz into my boss' office and do something about it. Often, the same friends then go on for five minutes offering opinions about Tebow.
The Broncos traded Tebow to the Jets on Wednesday, March 21, 2012. The NFL suspended Sean Payton and most of the Saints brass for Bountygate the same day. It was a sunny, clear day on the East Coast. I had a tax appointment that afternoon. That day is as clear in my memory as the days of my sons' births.
An email arrived in late afternoon. Here is the exact text of the email, still sitting in my inbox, sent to 15 writers and editors at The New York Times, one of the most venerable news institutions on earth:
"Let's meet in person or by phone to talk tebow at 1030 Thursday. Ideas small, large, serious, irreverent, ambitious, tough minded, football, faith.
"
This was the editorial equivalent of an all-points bulletin.
One writer pitched an entire Tebow genealogy in that meeting. He had traced the Dutch origin of the name and was seeking distant ancestors and relatives. Other writers began detailed investigations into Tebow's church. I called NFL Matchup executive producer Greg Cosell to help me break down Tebow's mechanics, which were already broken down—rimshot. Gubernatorial candidates would envy the creative coverage that backup quarterback received that spring.
We all felt rather silly then. But hey, the Jets had just traded for a quarterback who helped beat the Steelers in the playoffs two months earlier.
Flash back even further to December of 2011, when Tebow was at the tail end of his hot streak. Doug Farrar (now of Sports Illustrated) and I appeared by satellite on a sports talk show that does not exist on a sports network that has since changed names, though it still shows an awful lot of international cycling. The host hoped to rev up a Tebow parade but had the wrong talking heads for the job; he lobbed "Tebow has magical powers" questions at us, and we acted like Statler and Waldorf in the balcony of The Muppet Show.
But doesn't Tebow deserve to be in the MVP conversation simply for driving the narrative? asked the host.
We're trying to pick great football players, not characters in a play, I responded. I don't recall ever being asked back.
It was ridiculous. But we were at least talking about a starting NFL quarterback whose team was in the playoff chase.
Flash forward to the summer of 2012. A dream team of veteran sportswriters were meeting in Manhattan to chart the course of a new startup website. We planned to be smart, prestigious, in-depth and unique. Then a high-ranking officer from a corporate parent arrived to give a pep talk.
"I don't think I have to tell you that we can never have too much Tebow," he said.
We all felt a little dirty. But my trip to Jets training camp in Cortland was already scheduled, because in the summer of 2012 the only places in the football world to be were Denver (where Peyton Manning's comeback had just begun) and Cortland.
Flash forward to June 11, 2013. The Patriots signed Tim Tebow while I was covering the U.S. Open and buying fixtures for a new kitchen. Compelled to sideline Phil Mickelson and Justin Rose for a day, I wrote a gag article titled "Patriots Release Tim Tebow." I dated it August 31 and made it look like canned boilerplate accidentally published by someone pushing the wrong button. The original has been deleted, but the silly story got far more attention than anything I wrote about golf that week.
Tebow was released on August 31. We just reprinted the article. It drove traffic again.
It was silly then, 18 months ago. It was silly at 9:16 a.m. on Monday when an editor reached out to me. Mike Freeman had already pointed out the obvious. What value could be added? A March interview with Tom House was the last trick up my sleeve. I called House on Monday hoping for a follow-up. We're sorry, Mister House's phone line is experiencing higher-than-normal volume. You are caller number – 27 – in the queue behind every other member of the Philadelphia sports media, you nitwit.
My editor understandingly allowed me to wait until the Tebow-Chip Kelly presser, even though there would be no Tebow or Kelly at the presser.
Maybe I should have pitched a piece about Dutch genealogy.
In nightmares, 20,000 years have passed, and the human race has splintered into two species. The media-saturated Web-citizens have become Eloi. We bask in the sunshine, eat banquets of mysterious provenance and banter telepathically about silly, meaningless topics all day long. Then the sirens erupt across the Eden-like landscape:
TEEE-BOW, TEEEE-BOW, TEEE-BOW
Thoughtlessly, instinctively, we queue up like slaughterhouse cattle. The Morlocks conditioned our descendants over the generations to respond to those syllables. Instead of clicking a link or tuning in to ESPN or taking to Facebook or a comment thread with Pavlovian elation or disgust, our great-great-great-great grandchildren march single file into the Morlock ovens.
This is just the first chapter in the Kelly-Tebow saga. Perhaps that explains the hush that fell over South Philly on Thursday morning. Tebow is not the storm, he's the calm. The draft is the storm, with Kelly splattering paint and draft picks all over the NFL's canvas in an attempt to paint a Jackson Pollock-Marcus Mariota masterpiece.
Indeed, Marynowitz was as repetitiously "on message" on any question with a Mariota theme as he was about Tebow, stressing that the Eagles are "philosophically opposed to mortgaging the future" by trading up and that the team wants more picks, not less, in this year's draft. But he added the "never say never" caveats.
The 2015 Eagles offseason has had more false endings than a James Brown concert. Kelly wasn't absent from Thursday's media session; he was backstage, ready to slip out of his silk cape and storm the stage and blow our minds one more time.
Perhaps. It's a testament to Kelly's power, and to a half-decade of Tebow fatigue, that the Eagles could conceivably sign Tim Tebow, then do something even more spectacular for an encore.
Tebow Time is the phenomenon of dreading the thought of being asked to write an article, feeling left out when you aren't asked to write an article, then feeling jealous about a colleague's Web traffic. It's more of an affliction than an event. Perhaps it has finally run its course. But that may just be the hallucinatory fever talking.
Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report.
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