Monday, March 19, 2012

Marketing Tebow

As a Broncos' fan DBSF was quite pleased to learn that Peyton Manning had selected Denver as the organization to resume his career. DBSF never bought the Tebow narrative of 'he finds a way to win' and foresaw that sticking with Tebow would continually delay Denver's need to rebuild an offense and find a franchise quarterback. Now that the Tebow experiment is over Denver must focus on getting the greatest return for him through a trade. Two main problems stand in the way. First, teams know that Denver wishes to trade Tebow so the team loses much of its bargaining power. Second, Tebow is basically a Peyton Hillis that also gets to throw the ball 12-16 times a game. As such, Denver needs to understand how it can best market Tebow to maximize their return in a draft pick. DBSF recommends selling Tebow based on two factors.

First, religiousness. Based on religious and cultural patterns in the US the idea of marketing Tebow as a marque player to any team in the mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and West Coast is inadvisable as religion hasn't been trending in these regions for a few decades. Basically, they have to look at teams from Florida up to the Carolinas and West to Utah'ish. Unfortunately, while that is a lot of land it's really a lot of uninhabited Bureau of Land Management land with few professional football teams per square . . . state it seems like. (But then again there are like four super religious states in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma with just masses of people dedicated to things, like protecting gun rights for white felons and preventing any employment opportunities to people with a surname that could even slightly be perceived as of Hispanic origin, that don't have a pro football team. And, this is the exact population that would likely frame pictures of Tebow in their house and support him through 0-16 seasons by rationalizing their team's failure as not the result of the QB that takes a knee to pray after most first downs--including, ironically, those made as a result of penalties--but as a result of perceived mistakes of the non-whites on the field.)

Second, will. It could be will, it could be desire, it could be commitment*. In the end it doesn't matter what Elway and the fellow Broncos call it just make sure it has two qualities. First, it must reflect an intangible. Second, it must be impossible to measure quantitatively. It might even be a decent idea to make up a word, like  "spirwill", that encompasses things like teamwork, commitment, effort, will, whatever. Literally, revel in the infinite intangibility. The core factor though is that in no way can the other team measure spirwill or whatever. DBSF always loved the absolutely logically baffling argument that "he just wants to win" as suggesting that the key to Tebow's success is that he had uncovered this revolutionary theory that no other NFL player had ever encountered--the desire or intention to win the game. Like for the past 80 or so years that the NFL or one of its derivatives had functioned every player was out there running around in some passive anomie with no intent or direction other than to follow a ball during four 15 minute increments after which some noise mechanism would sound, which indicated that 'good job boys, you did your work' and it was time to go home. When one steps away from Tebowmania all the hype sounds absolutely inane and almost makes you feel like we were trapped in some Orwellian parallel universe. (And, for those that think DBSF is being over-the-top in his assessment of Tebowmania please then explain Skip Bayless's around the clock presence on ESPN and ESPN2 if this is not the case.) Ergo, Religiousity + Non-quantifiably measureable qualities = 3rd round pick?

* Author's aside: There exists somewhat of a corollary between points one and two that should be acknowledged. Considering the population DBSF is recommending the Broncos target in #1 it is imperative that for #2 the Broncos don't employ descriptors, like magic or supernatural. In fact, "spirit" might even be over the top as it sounds kind of new age/ Wicken. 

2 comments:

  1. Fire Skip Bayless

    Selling Tebow is like selling water to a whale

    ReplyDelete
  2. yeah man i seen skip bayless down there at the craps with ant walker

    ReplyDelete