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I am not a football watcher.  I don’t know what a sports is, nor do I watch the ball that is kicked with the foot, despite 90% of the game, nay the ultimate goal, being to hold the ball with your arms.  I fancy myself more of a football listener, in that I have heard a thing or two about it with my ears.  Although if we’re to use the same logic that named football, I suppose I actually mean I’m doing the listening with eyes, or some such.

IRREGARDLESS!

I have deigned to climb down from my hedonism tower, where I savor chocolate baths three times a day and drink wine from the vine, to the village below to tell you all a thing or two about this game.  Fans of the game might say I have no room to speak on the matter.  To them I say “BAH!  If following the game is itself a game of such skill, then why is it every year I and my three-year old cousin outshine you so-called fans in the College Football Pools?  Eh?  Eh?  What say you that?  Just dumb luck, hm?”

So, here goes nothing!  NOTE: Due to my fear that I will confuse one player for another, I have declined to post actual photos of the footballers in question, and instead have decided to go with more artistically appropriate Silent Movie Title Cards.

“This Tim Tebow character, I’m not sure I enjoy the way this is developing,” says the English money man if our world were an independent theater production.

Here we have a man, Tebow, who foots the ball for the Denver Broncos, and is creating quite a fan-based mania despite their just having lost brutally to the New England Winners (or whatever their name is).  There is a lot of hubub about him, positive (because of his outspoken Christian views and the way he plays) and negative (because of his outspoken Christian views and the way he plays).  Yet for all this hubub, I’m worry that there will be a lot of confusion at my “Just for Laughs” Super Bowl Party when we are finished bemoaning the one millionth re-airing of the Sofia Vergara Diet Coke Ad and want to know where this T-bone (sp?) is we’ve been hearing so much about?

Is this one of those times where we think he’ll play more consistently amazing next year, and this year was just grooming for the coming seasons, like when we were given Eagle Eye and Disturbia a year before Transformers so that we were totally prepared to understand that we love Shia LaBeouf, he’s our favorite?  IS THAT WAS THIS IS, FOOTBALL PLANNERS?!

Or is this that he’s had a couple of great games, a lot of bad ones, and he’s just the kind of the kind of big-grinned white boy America thinks it needs right now that Tom Brady has gone all Tag Heuer-liking/supermodel baby-planting on us?  That sort of cash-waving won’t fly in today’s America.  We’ve got a culture war on, sir.  You’re not going any farther unless  you…of course…win a whole bunch of games in a row.

But what about Eli Manning?  The New York Giants underdog that trounced overdog Tom Brady and the Patriots three years ago to win that Super Bowl?  The guy who just a won a whole bunch of his games?  Where’s the hero worship of that goofy bastard?

A New York Magazine article on him from 2008 shines a little light on that:

Eli just isn’t a fire-in-the-belly kind of guy. More like a well-balanced breakfast in the belly. And off the field, he’s just as disappointing. He talks to his mom on the phone nearly every day. He can’t even get stalked properly. When paparazzi caught [Tom] Brady in the Village in a medical boot, it touched off worldwide headlines. Meanwhile, a Gawker Stalker had this to say about Eli, seen leaving a steakhouse: “Looked like average guy. Very boring!” Eli doesn’t date supermodels. He lives with his college sweetheart in Hoboken. You may understand nothing about football, or sports, but surely you understand this: When you’re the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft and you move to New York City, you don’t live with your college sweetheart. In Hoboken.

So basically, Eli Manning is a good guy who lives on your sofa, plays Skyrim and then brushes the Nature Valley crumbs off his shirt so he can win a Super Bowl or two.  I don’t know, Eli seems like a decent guy where those others sound a little insufferable.

Little does America realize that it is experiencing the rise of the Beta Male.  Decent guys who don’t want trouble, enjoy their creature comforts, don’t want anyone damned to hell and aren’t jagoffs.  They don’t go to Strip Clubs, and they choose to stay home from the stripping clubs not because they’re full of icky vagina-having sinners but rather because shrug.  These are the men that are buying Esquire Magazine, headlining hit films and winning Super Bowls these-a-days.

Now, back finally to Mr. Tebow.  The popular, virginity until marriage lad seems relatively harmless.  However.  He put out an anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl two years ago, and it of course raised quite a stir.  No one makes an anti-abortion ad without expecting it to cause a stir.  This ad was produced by Focus on the Family, a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group that has very recently said this about gays:

“Focus on the Family also opposes the efforts of radical homosexual ‘social reformers’ who wish to redefine the family, permit homosexual ‘marriages,’ be able to adopt children and recruit the young.”

As well as:

“It is sometimes possible, although always difficult, for a person to move from a homosexual to a heterosexual orientation.”

This decision to air the Focus on the Family ad was also curious because it aired on CBS, a network where, in 2004, they refuse to air an ad for United Church of Christ because it “doesn’t air polarizing advocacy ads.”  United Church of Christ is one of the few faiths that are completely open-armed to gays.

Something I find to be dangerous (and sticky) about the ad is the one thing that has been thought of as a positive aspect:  the content.  It was a story of Tim Tebow’s mother, Pam, who contracted amoebic dysentery in the Philippines while doing missionary work.  She was pregnant with Tim at the time, and she was told if she continued with pregnancy, there was a high risk of herself dying as well.  She defied the doctor’s orders, kept the baby, and that baby was Tim Tebow!  Holds a lot more panache than if they had said, “and that boy was Roger Tebow!”  I’m guessing the effect they wanted is “keep your baby, even if it kills you, because he could be famous someday.”

Heartwarming story, yes.  I’m a fancy man, not a robot.  But how often does a full mother and child recovery happen in cases like that?

Well, two years later, Focus on the Family has gone football happy again and released this cute little doom-laced advertisement during last week’s Broncos-Patriots game:

EVERYONE!

As long as Focus on the Family gives money (that it gets from Chick-Fil-A) to efforts to stop or repeal marriage and adoption rights from gays and lesbians across America, there’s just no way to watch these cute football ads with anything but a sickening irony.

And lastly, what are we to make of Tim Tebow?  He has gagged his publicity team from saying one thing or another about his feelings on gay marriage or gays at all, despite blowback from the Focus on the Family ad.  The media hasn’t been kind of late to athletes that voice anti-gay opinions, if he does have anti-gay opinions.  If he has pro-gay opinions, the special relationship between him and Focus on the Family clearly wouldn’t work, to say nothing of his “Aren’t You Glad I Didn’t Abort You?”-talking Mom.  And if he’s neutral on the subject, well, something tells me he isn’t neutral on the subject…

Oh, come now!  You had fun watching that video, and you know it!  Enjoy your Big Game, gay boys.  I’ll be drinking wine with boyfriend that night, and I might tune in long enough to see which man will inherit the Earth: The Alpha Brady, the Beta Manning or the Omega Tebow.  (HINT:  It’s probably gonna be “Beta.”)