The weird thing is that I totally understand why Perry would make a crippling statement like that. This man, who as recently as September was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, got a miserly 0.7% of the votes in the New Hampshire Primary. Perry did so poorly that he lost to “Other” by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. The man had no choice but try and take Romney out at the knees, even if it meant submarining his own party’s central economic tenet. It’s like a defensive back in football yanking a wide receiver down by the back of his jersey after he’s been thoroughly burned off the line. Yeah, he’s going to take a huge pass interference penalty, but if he didn’t grab the guy, our DB friend would be watching his man doing the Cabbage Patch in the end zone. It was a desperate act buy a desperate man, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t truth to what he says, although I disagree with his choice of metaphorical animal.

It is both alliterative and politically convenient for men like Perry and Gingrich to refer to Romney as a “Vulture Capitalist,” but that would be overly simplistic and unfair to Mitt and to Bain Capital. It would be more appropriate to say that Bain Capitol is akin to a lion or an alligator; basically any predatory animal that you’d want to watch in super slow motion on the Discovery Channel. And, as all of nature’s hunters have learned to do over the years, Bain Capital goes after the small and the weak. No one would ever chastise a Cheetah for going after the gazelle with the bum leg lingering in the back of the herd. Why would you criticize a money-making enterprise for buying up a company when it’s the economic equivalent of a slow, inattentive water buffalo? As a businessman, Mr. Romney appears to have been very effective, making himself and his investors much richer in the process. Of course, while Romney is touting the supposed “100,000” new jobs Bain created under his watch, the truth is that these “new jobs” are—at best—an ancillary benefit. Romney’s only real duty was to his investors. The fact that formerly Bain-run companies like Staples, Domino’s Pizza or The Sports Authority created jobs was just as immaterial to Romney and his investors as were the 22% of companies that either filed for bankruptcy or dissolved within eight years of being acquired by Bain. What mattered was the fact that out of the $1.1 Billion given to the company by investors, Bain gave out a return of $2.5 Billion by the time Romney left the firm in 1999.

Mitt Romney (center) Does Not Ball on a Budget.

While Romney may be a successful businessman by most accounts, does that necessarily mean that he would make a great president? Here is where Perry’s Vulture Capitalism dig picks up a little more momentum. If you attack Romney’s business acumen, then you are sure to lose because he was playing by the rules of the (kinda-sorta-almost) free market. Capitalism is a Hobbesian get-up where the biggest and the strongest are encouraged to beat the ever-living piss out of whosoever has the poor sense to get in their way. There ain’t no damn sense in crying “foul” when you’re playing on big business’ turf, especially when many of those same big businessmen are filling the coffers of your campaign’s war chest. Any attempt to paint Romney as unfit for the presidency shouldn’t focus on his capabilities as a businessman, which are difficult to fault. Rather, any argument concerning the skill set and experience Romney brings with him from the private sector should try to show why these qualities aren’t necessarily germane to being an effective leader of the men, or at the very least, convincing said men to vote for you come November.

Let’s take a look at Staples Inc to from the point of view of Romney the businessman and Romney the candidate. Of the 100,000 jobs that Romney has repeatedly claimed to have created while at Bain, roughly 90% of them came from Staples Inc, a company that they invested in at its inception back in 1986 at its sole location in Framingham, Massachusetts. Today, Staples Inc. has over 2,000 stores and 89,000 employees, making it the largest and most profitable office supply company on the planet. From a business standpoint it was phenomenal deal for Romney: Bain Capital ended up reaping a sevenfold increase on their return and Romney himself served on the Staples Board of Directors for over a decade. And now, candidate Romney can claim a stellar job creation record because of , in large part, one crucial investment. The only thing is, did Romney and Staples Inc. actually create new jobs or did they simply redistribute them?

I don’t know about y’all, but when I hear talk about creating new jobs, I envision jobs that had not previously existed and which added to the overall size and health of the job market. For instance, the first “health food store” I can remember seeing in Cincinnati was a Wild Oats that sprang up with the construction of the Rookwood Commons shopping center. Now, all of the jobs that were filled at that Wild Oats, along with the other new stores in the shopping center, represented a tangible growth in the overall labor market. In 2007, Whole Foods Market Inc. completed their buyout of Wild Oats for $565 million and the Rookwood Commons’ Wild Oats was no more. All of their signage and and merchandise and the whole bit was pitched and replaced with Whole Foods swag. Today, despite the fact that the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed their decision on the merger and Whole Foods was forced to sell Wild Oats, the space in Rookwood Commons is still a Whole Foods. And if you ask anyone who works for the business side of Whole Foods if those are “new jobs”, they’re going to say yes. Ask anyone who actually worked inside that Wild Oats/Whole Foods when the merger took place if there were new jobs created and they’d probably go tell you to fuck yourself.

What does this have to do with Romney’s 100,000 new job claim? Well, I for one don’t buy that Staples Inc. magically pulled 89,000 jobs out of their ass without effecting decimating or absorbing countless other businesses. Since 1987, Staples Inc. has made 52 separate acquisitions., including but not limited to, Business Depot Ltd. (’94), Quill Corporation (’98), Medical Arts Press (’02), Chiswick (’06), American Identity (’07) and Corporate Express (’08). To put that into perspective, when Staples Inc. acquired Corporate Express and re-branded it as Staples Advantage, they did so to the tune of $2.6 Billion and, at the time of the merger, almost 18,000 “new” employees. I couldn’t find anything stating the status of those employees since the acquisition, but even if they all still have their exact same positions, that represents over 20% of the jobs “created” by Staples Inc. For Romney the businessman, that acquisition did create 18,000 new jobs for a company he invested heavily in, but for Romney the candidate, all that represents is a new boss for his more fortunate constituents and unemployment for the rest.

Beyond the direct links between Bain and Staples’ job growth, there are the natural ebb and flow of the new global and hyper-digital marketplace. When Staples was conceived in the mid-eighties, how many typewriter distributors and manufacturers do you think there were? What about cameras? There has been talk about former photo giant Kodak filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as soon as February. In 1982, Kodak had over 60,000 employees at the headquarters in Rochester, NY. Today, they’re down to a paltry 7,400. The digital camera may have been a boon for office superstores like Staples, but when Romney campaigns through upstate New York, “job creation” at places like Sony or Nikon doesn’t really mend any fences (especially considering both companies are Japanese).

The image that got me thinking about Bain Capital so much was that of Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life, sitting behind his ornate desk in his wicker-back wheelchair, making tents with his fingers and trying to figure out some way to stop old George Bailey. If ever there were a more pure distillation of unbridled capitalism, I’ve never seen it. But, despite being a “scurvy little spider,” Mr. Potter was a hell of a businessman and if he were running Bain Capital, I don’t know if he’d have done anything much differently. But ask anyone which fictional man they’d rather have for president and they’d all tell you they want Jimmy Stewart. As a businessman, he was absolutely dreadful and that was the entire point: he barely made a red cent off of all of his investments at the Building and Loan because he cared so much about his community and charged microscopic interest to his clients. Hell, the man gave out his damned honeymoon savings when the Depression hit and all the banks were closing and even biggest simpleton could have told you he was going to take a bath on the thing. Which leads us to the contradiction that I tried to start this whole damned thing with:

Despite what everyone on the campaign trail might tell you, Republican or Democrat, there is no compassion in capitalism. The principal reason that Mitt Romney was such a successful businessman is because he thought in terms of corporations instead of individual people. He has gone so far as to say on multiple occasions over the past few weeks that “corporations are people” too. His spurious argument is that since corporations are made up of people and since everything created by a corporation goes to people, then it follows that corporations are people. By this, “whatever we’re made of, we are” argument, it can be inferred that Romney believes that hospitals are doctors and zoos are animals. But, the bigger point is this is simply one more way of dehumanizing the American electorate. If it stands to reason that corporations are people, then it must also be true that all people are simply bits and pieces of corporations. The bigger bit or piece that you represent, the greater your personal worth. In this worldview we are all the bastard children of Henry Ford. America is one big, synchronized, ever-changing assembly line and if you don’t like it you can get the hell out ’cause there are millions of people all over the world and within these borders that would kill to be making $7.25/hr screwing the the caps on tubes of toothpaste. Romney, Gingrich, Paul, Obama…they’re all foreman who give us our marching orders and the truth is those orders don’t vary much. However, with what limited say I have in the process, I’d at least like to vote for the guy who at the very least pretends to side with the worker every once in a while.

Anyone who happened to catch The Daily Show on Monday night probably had a similar reaction when George Lucas began berating Hollywood for being racist. Lucas, who was on the show to promote his new film, Red Tails. On the show, Lucas busted out a fairly sizable, glossy-print race card to show the audience at home, lamenting the fact that no one in Hollywood would fund the film because studios claimed they “didn’t know how market a movie [with all black characters]” and wouldn’t back something that didn’t have any major white roles. All of this may be very true and not not trying to downplay the veracity of these statements in general. I’m sure that there are instances where it is significantly harder for a predominantly black cast and crew to get large amounts of funding for a film than it would be for a white cast and crew, especially if there is no marquee name stars attached to the project. What I am saying is that this theory most likely doesn’t hold true for this movie in particular and that Lucas is using a mitigating factor (race) to explain a bigger problem (why no one wanted to fund this movie). Correlation does not mean cause.

Neck...meet beard...Beard...meet neck.

Let’s start off by going right for the hypocrite jugular on this one. George Lucas was on The Daily Show promoting this film. George Lucas’ official title for the film is Executive Producer. I defy you to name the last time you saw an Executive Producer running the talk show circuit. Maybe Ron Howard the last time he funded some zany side project…maybe. You’re telling me, George, that you couldn’t send out one of your black stars like Terrence Howard or Cuba Gooding Jr. to promote the film? What about your black director Anthony Hemingway or your two black co-screenwriters, John Ridley and Aaron MacGruder? Instead, you decided it was high time the flanneled wonder himself graced Jon Stewart’s audience with his presence, a decision that could mean one of two things, both of them bad. A) It might imply that you actually hold similar beliefs to those Hollywood-types you just criticized and that you don’t believe your all-black cast can adequately sell this movie on their own. Or, b) it just means that you are a supremely egotistical fuckwit who just needed to have a soap box to stand on. Oh yeah, and lets just do a quick run down of all the great black characters that George Lucas has put on screen. All I’ve got is Lando Calrissean, whatever the crap character Samuel L Jackson’s Jedi-ass was, and the Stepin Fetchit stylings of Jar Jar Binks. Yep….that’s all of ‘em…all three of ‘em.

So, since we got over the whole George Lucas-being-a-tool-thing, let’s get on to the real reasons why this movie had such a hard time coming to fruition. First, the film has no big name star. Sure people are familiar with Terrence Howard and probably like Cuba Gooding Jr., but that doesn’t mean they’re box office draws. Cuba Gooding Jr’s career nosedived right around the time he opted to make Snow Dogs and Gay Boat (Okay…okay, the film was actually called Boat Trip) and hasn’t had to carry a movie as a principle lead since the ill-advised developmental disability drama, Radio. Howard, on the other hand, has turned in some great performances in small, independent films like Hustle & Flow and Crash, but has never successfully pulled off a big-budget popcorn flick. If Red Tails had been able to get some A-List black protagonists for the film, like Denzel, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman or Samuel L. Jackson, then his movie would have been plenty well funded. Even that second-tier of great black actors who can aren’t considered instant box office draws, but still can carry a film—guys like Don Cheadle, Jaime Foxx, Laurence Fishburne—would have made it unnecessary for George Lucas to go on cable television and tell us his tale of woe.

Beyond the wattage of the actors involved, the men behind the camera don’t do much to inspire confidence. Director Anthony Hemingway has done some fantastic work with some high-quality TV shows like The Wire, Treme, First Blood and The Closer, but he has never directed a feature film before. Likewise, the two screenwriters for the film, John Ridley and Aaron MacGruder, have some nice credentials, but seem like odd choices for a Biopic about the Tuskegee Airmen. Both men have their writing backgrounds in TV comedy, Ridley most recently with The Wanda Sykes Show and the TV series Barbershop, while MacGruder is the creative force behind The Boondocks. And of course, there is Lucasfilm itself. The last good movie they produced was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade back in 1989. Ever since then they’ve raked in huge box office numbers by trotting out sequels and prequels of little substance to fan bases who would gladly pay to see anything related to their beloved franchise (be it Star Wars or Indiana Jones) on the screen. And, since Red Tails isn’t set on Tattooine and doesn’t involve any absentee archaeology professors, then we can pretty much rule that crowd out.

If you have any doubts as to the validity of my argument, I implore you to watch the trailer. Does anything about this film scream out to you, “I must see this!” Listening to Terrence Howard’s canned speech about bringing back husbands to their wives I can actually hear him stifling a yawn. It might have something to do with the fact that both Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. have played Tuskegee Airmen before in their careers. Howard played one of two Tuskegee Airmen prisoners of war alongside Bruce Willis and Colin Farrell in Hart’s War, while Cuba Gooding Jr. was in the critically acclaimed HBO movie The Tuskegee Airmen, which had a legitimately all-star cast, featuring Laurence Fishburn, Andre Braugher, Mekhi Phifer, Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Courtney B. Vance. Somehow, a white guy bitching about not getting funding for a movie because it was too black, when a movie about the same historical figures had already been made once in the mid-90′s, doesn’t really tug at my heartstrings.

Yet, here we sit, 64 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and the national debate on race has taken a different flavor to it. With the inclusion of The Rooney Rule² in the NFL and the slow increase in African-American coaches within the NCAA, it appears as though the only major cultural equity hurdle left for organized sport is GLBT rights. But, even the “gay/lesbian” issue within sports is different than prior civil rights struggles because of the way professional (and to a lesser extent, collegiate) sports’ views on the subject compare to the rest of society. When the Cleveland Browns signed African-Americans Marion Motley and Bill Willis in 1946, the nation at large was not receptive to any notions of integration or racial equality. However, in the wake of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and a surge in pro-civil union sentiment, it appears that Americans in 2011 are by and large supportive of GLBT rights, especially when you don’t mention religious marriage. Meanwhile, of the over 4,000 professional athletes in the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS and PGA Tour, none of them are openly gay. The conceit that there are no gays in professional American sport is about as believable as the idea that Prince Fielder is a vegetarian. You don’t tip the scales at 285 lbs by eating soy cutlets and you don’t yield a 0% homosexuality rate by playing sports that involve tons of dude-on-dude contact and countless hours in a locker room with a bunch of guys built like Charles Atlas.

What got me on this whole tangent was an article by J.A. Adande on ESPN LA about the new look Lakers, and by new look, he means honkified. For the first time since the late 70s, the Lake Show features 5 American-born, white guys: Steve Blake, Josh McRoberts, Luke Walton, Troy Murphy and Jason Kapono. While the huge influx of international talent like Pau Gasol, Manu Ginobli, Dirk Nowitzki and Mehmet Okur has made a huge impact on the league, it has created a new racial dynamic within the NBA. These players are not really considered to be “white,” even though their pigment might suggest otherwise. Instead of being seen as “white”, they’re “Spanish” or “Argentinean” or whatever their nationality happens to be³. It is the same way with the difference between African-American and African players. Take Luol Deng for instance: phenomenal defensive player, has a lot of heart, always good for 15+ points and some key boards and he is not “black.” The man was born in South Sudan, sent to Egypt as a boy and eventually ended up coming of age in Great Britain before moving to the States. His experience and upbringing have virtually nil to do with Black America, so to qualify him as “Black” because his skin color is more like Dwayne Wade ‘s than Andrei Kirilenko’s is a mistake.

Little Known Fact: White forwards and centers are contractually obligated to have bad knees.

The white basketball star has become an endangered species within the modern landscape of professional basketball. Not since the World Champion Boston Celtics teams of the 1980s has a franchise regularly featured five white guys on the court at the same time⁴. Since that time, the list of white NBA players has been about as short as Chris Mullins’ crew cut. The last instance I could find of a team playing five different white players in the same game was in a January 2009 contest between the Toronto Raptors and Indiana Pacers, a club who until recently had wrested control of the league’s whitest roster honors⁵. Just as an example of how few white players there actually are in the NBA, three of the players involved in that game—McRoberts, Murphy and Kapono—are now with the Lakers. This leads me to believe that caucasian ballers are the basketball equivalent of the Band Aids that got traded for a case of Heineken in Almost Famous.

I never have to worry about race affecting my perception of the Lakers because I despise them with every fiber of my basketball being, but, that isn’t always the case. If I’m honest with myself, I find myself admitting that I often find myself rooting for a player or team in part because they’re white. However, the catch is, that white athletes have to already be marginalized within their given sport. For example, I find myself rooting for most white running backs or wide receivers in the NFL. With every single other position on the football field, I could give a shit, but I am instantly drawn to any white skill player. Then again, when it comes to baseball and hockey, I find myself pulling for African-American players. So, what is the common thread behind these seemingly racist cheering tendencies of mine?

The answer, like that of many questions in my life, is Rocky Balboa. Or, more accurately, the man who Sylvester Stallone based Rocky on, Chuck Wepner. The Bayonne Bleeder, as he was known to his contemporaries for his proclivity to gush torrents of blood during his fights, was an overweight schlub of a heavyweight fighter from New Jersey whose main talent was that he could take a punch better than anyone else in the country. The man wasn’t so much white as he was pink and his hue was complimented by a thinning mop of reddish hair and a handlebar mustache. Like his cinematic likeness, Chuck took Muhammad Ali (Apollo Creed) a full 15 rounds, sending the champ to the canvas once in the 9^th round. Yet, it would be overly simplistic to say we love Chuck Wepner/Rocky Balboa because he was white. Primarily, we love Wepner because, objectively, he had no business being in the same arena as Ali, much less taking him the distance. It’s for the exact same reason why we were so captivated when a 45-year old George Foreman took his Buddha-looking body and beat the daylights out of Micheal Moorer, a man young enough to be his son, for the Heavyweight title.

Race informs how I view sports, for good or for ill. I have a hard time seeing how anyone could filter it out. The first time you watched a NASCAR race and Juan Pablo Montoya’s name popped up on the screen, don’t tell me you didn’t think to yourself, “What the shit is a Colombian doing at a NASCAR race?”⁶ We notice race like we notice all our defining characteristics. It’s just that it comes with more baggage than appraising someone’s hair color or shoe size. Unless you happen to be a ginger, like Andy Dalton. In which case you better have a strong arm and a good sense of humor.

It is only out of necessity that I subject you to this horrific clash of pitch and podium, as the college bowl season and Republican Primaries unfold in synchronistic chaos. Thus, I have decided to view these bowl games as analogs for last night’s Iowa Caucuses. Hopefully, by melding the two I can dispense with my seething hate and contempt for them both and attempt to regain some much needed sanity for the months ahead. A few ground rules before we start: First, no presidential candidate can represent a university which they themselves would have been unable to get into. For example, Michelle Bachmann received her undergrad education at Winona State and received her J.D. from Oral Roberts, which would disqualify her from being represented by schools such as Stanford or the University of Michigan that have high academic standards. On the other hand, Newt Gingrich received a BA and MA from Emory, along with a PhD in Modern European History from Tulane before becoming a history professor himself at West Georgia College, so we can assume his scores would have gotten him in most places. Another rule is that the size of the campaign must reflect the size of the school athletic program that represents it. Mitt Romney’s behemoth campaign budget and Super PAC support makes it absurd to use a university like San Diego State to represent him. And the final rule is that Ron Paul’s representative school CANNOT belong to any BCS conference as it would violate his Libertarian views. Let’s roll…

1.  Michelle Bachmann – Arizona State. More than anything, both of these “teams” didn’t deserve to be where they were. Arizona State was a .500 football team with an over-the-hill coach in Dennis Erikson who already knew he was out after the Las Vegas Bowl no matter what his team did. Team Bachmann peaked during the Ames Straw Poll in August and had been steadily crashing for the past six months until she needed a self-avowed “miracle” last night. In each case, they met up with an opposition that was better than they were in every facet of the game and who wiped the floor with their sorry asses. ASU got #7 Boise State, a 11-1 team that had just been jobbed out of a BCS bid for the third time in four years and who sported the winningest quarterback in NCAA history. Bachmann got a well oiled Romney juggernaut, a fanatic Ron Paul base and the flavor-of-the-week in Santorum to contend with, along with fellow outcasts Gingrich and Perry. To their credit, Arizona State made their contest closer than Bachmann’s racking up a few 2^nd half touchdowns to cut Boise’s lead down to 32 at the final whistle, while Bachmann barely nabbed 5% of the votes and headed home with her satanic tail between her legs.

2.  Rick Perry – Texas A&M. It just feels right to keep Perry in his home state of Texas and with a team that ended up winning the Texas Bowl over Northwestern at that. But, both campaigns ended with pyrrhic victories of one sort or another. All year, A&M seemed to accumulate halftime leads before inevitably squandering them in the 3^rd and 4^thquarters. In five of their six losses they led earlier in the game by a double-digit margin, a statistic that led directly to head coach Mike Sherman’s dismissal in early December. They clearly had the talent to compete for the a BCS berth and perhaps even a national title, but their follow-through in big games was so poor that they barely cracked .500. It was the same way for Perry, who was the front-runner in Iowa for the Republican nomination by as much as 10 percentage points back in late November. However, a series of public gaffes during the debates, interviews, and…there was a third one…I know there was a third one in there somewhere….oh, hell, he fucked up and now he’s probably making his last stand in South Carolina.

Now, I might vote for Chris Farley "playing" Newt Gingrich for President.

3.  Newt Gingrich – Georgia. Good old Newtie went to school in the state of Georgia, taught in the state of Georgia and represented Georgia’s 6^th congressional district for 20 years so it’s only fitting that we should send him back home. You see, both Newtie and the Georgia Bulldogs have incredibly inflated, unrealistic and misleading perceptions of themselves. The Bulldogs went 10-4 this year, losing the Outback Bowl in Triple OT to Michigan State. And yet, simply being in the SEC gave them a bravado and reputation that they didn’t deserve. Never mind that they lost to Boise State and South Carolina or that they were destroyed in the SEC Championship by LSU. Don’t think about how South Carolina was the only other ranked team in SEC East and that the power dynamic in the conference tilts mightily to the West. Likewise, you shouldn’t spend time on the fact that Gingrich is an egomaniacal sociopath who wants to create the world in his image and was all but kicked out of congress in 1999. You also shouldn’t bring up that, while Newtie was trying to get Slick Willie impeached for getting an adulterous blow job, Newt himself was having an affair behind the back of Wife #2 with the lucky lady who would become Wife #3⁴. Pay no heed to the fact that Gingrich has no retort for any of his opponents attacks than, “well, you want to debate motherfucker? You, me, a microphone, Chris Wallace and some cameras! Let’s get it on you skank-ass bitch!”

4.  Ron Paul – Houston. Neither the University of Houston or Ron Paul was ever taken too seriously this year and with good reason. Now, I’m not applauding the mainstream media’s lackluster coverage of Paul’s campaign or Houston’s nearly undefeated season, but it’s safe to say that very few outside of the Paul and Cougar camps thought they could win it all. Case Keenum had a record-setting career at Houston, passing for more yards than any quarterback in NCAA history while his offense averaged over 50 points a game in 2011. But, languishing in the dim constellation of Conference USA, they went without facing a ranked team until their conference championship game. Before that championship loss against #24 Southern Mississippi, no one gave them a chance to crack the Top 5 in the BCS and that was certainly the case after tallying their first loss. Similarly, Paul had a difficult time shaking the label of party outsider and it was the common media narrative to paint him as too extremist in his Libertarian views to ever win the party nomination. And, while his 3^rd place finish in Iowa with 21% of the vote isn’t too far removed from the top two spots, the loss is pretty much a fatal one for his nomination hopes. Exit polling showed Paul gaining a very substantial portion of his votes from independent and first time voters, a group that won’t be able to vote in any upcoming closed primaries that accept only Registered Republicans. So, even if he’s able to squeak out a state here and there like Houston finished their season off by beating Penn State in the TicketCity.Com Bowl, it won’t matter much in the end.

5.  Rick Santorum – Notre Dame. Initially I was drawn to this comparison because of Santorum’s Conservative Catholicism, but now that I look at it, it is Notre Dame’s recent athletic history that most represents Santorum’s campaign. Much like Santorum’s surge in Iowa over the past few days, Notre Dame Football is consistently overrated and given more attention than it warrants. And much as Notre Dame lost to Florida State in the Champs Sports Bowl, Santorum will continue to lose primaries with the possible exception of South Carolina’s backwater ass. Yet, one instant from last year’s season sticks out most in my mind. A 20 year old video assistant and Notre Dame student, Declan Sullivan, was instructed to film a football practice from the top of a hydraulic lift in extremely windy conditions. As he went up and began filming through extreme 50 mph winds he tweeted, “Holy f**k, holy f**k. This is terrifying.” Within an hour he was dead after the lift toppled over due to the extreme winds. No one was held accountable for this. Athletic director Jack Swarbrick and head coach Brian Kelly retained their jobs and the university continues to bill itself as an institution with integrity. The Catholic Church, Notre Dame and Rick Santorum: that’s quite a hypocritical Holy Trinity.

6.  Mitt Romney – Oklahoma State. Ahhhhh…that sweet sweet cash just gets you so amped up doesn’t it? Delicious T. Boone Pickens’ oil monies to build new stadiums and new facilities, to get better equipment and better players. It’s just how Romney must feel this time around after 2008′s debacle. This election he’s got even more money and the backing of the Republican establishment and, oh snap! Did you hear John McCain’s senile old ass just endorsed him? So what if we only barely beat Santorum/lost to Iowa State. We’re going to win this year! We’re gonna fucking win! And then, what happens when you do eventually get the nomination in the middle of summer/after Oklahoma St. barely beat Stanford in overtime? Well, the best you’re ever going to do is second place. Mike Gundy may be a man and he may be forty, but nobody’s voting for his team because the winner of LSU-Alabama is the National Champion, no questions asked. For those of you playing at home, Obama is the LSU-Alabama winner and if Oklahoma State/Romney is the best shot the Republicans have at unseating him, then the next nine months are just a formality.

In just a few days, the eyes of the nation are going to turn to your pleasant, podunk, corn-riddled chunk of the globe to see the results of your little caucus. I know it’s a lot of pressure being saddled with the duty of being Kingmaker, but try and relax. You threw your homespun midwestern support behind Mike Huckabee four years ago and before you could say “Chuck Norris” he ended up behind a desk at Fox News. As a matter of fact, the only non-incumbent candidate chosen by Iowa Caucus-goers in its 36 year history that ended up in The White House was George W. Bush in 2000. The latest poll numbers show that Rick “gay sex is the gateway drug to incest¹” Santorum is riding the biggest surge of popular sentiment into Tuesday’s Caucus. No one has ever accused Iowa Conservatives of being sane and I’m rather doubtful they’ll decide to start on Tuesday. But, if there are any potential Iowa Caucus voters who are a) computer literate and b) willing to entertain an argument based in reason, then I implore you to read on.

Look, I don’t really know how to best break this to you, but here goes: The only candidate you can nominate who won’t turn the United States into the drunk, brain damaged uncle of the international community is Mitt Romney. I know what you’re thinking and I know you don’t care about how we look to other nations because we’re America dagnabbit and we’re the rootin’ tootin’-est superpower you ever did see. I get it. But it fucking matters. If someone like Ron Paul gets elected, we suddenly go from the cocky superstar QB of the football team who nobody particularly likes, but who everyone respects, to the kid in the back, sitting alone at his own table next to North Korea, picking the fruit bits out of his jello. Anyone with half a brain can see that Mitt Romney has the charisma of a piece of burnt toast, but at least people will still sit at his table.

A Digital Rendering of Ron Paul

Let’s take Ron Paul for instance. He’s the Paranoid Uncle who insists to you at family reunions that the government places tracking devices underneath all of cars so that they can track our whereabouts². He’s convinced that the federal government has it out for everybody and wants them to get their meaty paws of his money, despite the fact that he’s been employed by the federal government for the majority of his adult life. Among his many misguided ideas, Paranoid Uncle believes that the country was better off before “world-class adulterers³” like Martin Luther King Jr. integrated the races. Paranoid Uncle also wants to eliminate the U.S. Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Interstate Commerce Commission, Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. If you ask Paranoid Uncle about what would actually be left of the federal government if these changes were to happen, he starts talking to himself about states’ rights and begins to foam at the mouth.

If the spastic, jittery uncle isn’t really your type, I give you Sleazy Uncle Newt. Now on his third wife, Sleazy Newtie is an unrepentant egotist who has recently taken to referring to himself in the third person during dinner conversations. It is a universal family policy not to let any attractive non-blood-related relatives near Sleezy Newtie without an escort during family functions. Every year, for Christmas, Sleazy Newtie gives out the latest in his 41-part series of inspirational cassette tapes on the entrepreneurial spirit and self-assuredness. He also insists that the whole family stop what they’re doing and listen whenever one of his commercials for Newtie’s Barn of Cars ‘N Such comes on the TV. Anyone who marries into the family is told in no uncertain terms never to bring up the eighteen months in the mid-nineties that Sleazy Uncle Newtie spent in jail for embezzlement charges.

You get into a bit of a bind trying to gage what type of unseemly relatives Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann would be since they’re all just variations on the same thing: the culturally insensitive, arrogant imbecile. Normally, within the most extended families, this aunt or uncle normally has the common courtesy of being a sloppy drunk or a womanizer⁴ of sorts. I’m pretty sure Rick Perry has it in him⁵, but I don’t think Bachmann and Santorum are on the path to being Uncle Eddie from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Rick Perry is a proud charter member of the fraternity of Good Ole Uncles Who, Frankly, Don’t Give A Damn. He’s actually a less evolved version of George W. Bush…or more evolved, depending on how much you value competence and intellect. Everyone loves pounding back a few tallboys with Uncle Rick while he tells stories about when he used to go kill the neighbor’s wild boar’s with nothing but a bowie knife and a fifth of corn liquor. Uncle Rick is a generally likeable guy, but he is dumber than a post and will do almost anything you tell him to. You remember that guy back in high school would jump off the roof of your house because you told him to? Yep, that was Uncle Rick.

This Explains So Much...

Now, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum belong to a much less enjoyable sub-strata of the crazy relative universe, namely, that of the Hyper-Fundamentalist, Bigoted Cockgobbler . Over the years, the family has assembled a list of topics not to be brought up around Aunt Michelle and Uncle Santorum, ranging from homosexuality and marriage to most popular movies (stick to movies with animals in them) and music (Nothing made after 1979, except for choral groups and Creed). Aunt Michelle appears to be completely devoid of any emotion save some variation on indignation and self-righteousness, while Uncle Santorum seems to be able to make faces that vary on some sort of smuggery. Favorite pastimes of the Aunt and Uncle Cockgobbler include talking vaguely about the importance on family values, emphasizing that every time gays have butt sex, Jesus cries, and generally making everyone within a 150 foot radius of them uncomfortable.

These are all of your options not named Mitt Romney⁶ for Tuesday’s caucus. You’ve got the old geezer who wants to head the federal government only so that he can systematically destroy the federal government, the adulterous egomaniac who got run out of town on a rail and is only back due to the collective amnesia of 21^st Century America, the Good Ole Boy who hates gays and can’t remember what parts of the federal government he wants to get rid of, the Evangelical Nut-job from Minnesota who really hates gays and wants to add Ronald Reagan, Calvin Coolidge and James A. Garfield to Mt. Rushmore⁷, and a guy who hates gays so much it could lead one to surmise, given the nature of Haggard’s Law,⁸ that he is closeted himself. Your move, Iowa.

• North Korea’s Dear Leader Kim Jong Il was reported dead yesterday by North Korea’s state news agency yesterday at the age of 69. The diminutive dictator and Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comradely Love (one of his many titles) apparently died of a heart attack after “great physical and mental strain.” This final act, when coupled with his bouffant hairdo and penchant for overeating, has cemented Kim Jong Il’s place as his generation’s finest tiny Asian Elvis impersonator. Because if there was ever a kind, propagandistic way of saying someone died on the crapper, “passing away from great mental and physical strain” is it.

• 

  They all just called him Lil' Kin

• In other news regarding short pudgy men who likely suffer from diabetes and have a near-fatal love of pork and Hennessy, Baron Davis was signed to a 1 year, $2.5 million deal with the New York Knicks. Boom! Baron Davis fat joke in the two-spot! Play your cards right and you might get Prince Fielder “how the fuck does a vegetarian get that fat” joke for free.

• In international sporting news, 17 men have been arrested in Italy under charges of match-fixing and illegal betting in several Serie A and Serie B soccer matches from the past two years. A local source has told me that he expects the 17 men to be taken directly from lock-up to Rome, where they will meet with newly appointed Prime Minister Mario Monti about several open cabinet positions.

• Britney Spears announced over the weekend that she would be getting married again, this time to her boyfriend and previously unfamous-person Jason Trawick. Somewhere in the metropolitan LA area, Justin Timberlake was found in his giant pool filled with Grammy’s, gold coins and movie offers, being consoled by 15 former Victoria’s Secret models.

• Penn State Quarterback Matt McGloin’s status for the TicketCity Bowl is uncertain after he suffered a concussion and went into a seizure during a locker room fight with Nittany Lion wideout Curtis Drake. Backup QB Rob Bolden has been taking the snaps for McGloin, but he may be facing internal discipline after he stole a Gatorade bottle from a local convenience store. State College mayor Elizabeth Goreham is alleged to have put forth a referendum to consider renaming Happy Valley as The Basin of a Thousand Sorrows.

• I know it’s only a preliminary sampling and I realize that 16 movie reviews may mean nothing, but the impeccably-titled film We Bought a Zoo currently has a a positive 69% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I can only assume that this is because there is a scene wherein Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson tag team mud wrestle a horde of rhesus monkeys.

• Former New England Patriots running back and ESPN analyst Craig James, 50, has announced that he will be running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat from Texas in 2012. When asked what first inspired him to go into politics, Craig said cited his time as a Running Back at Southern Methodist University in the early eighties: “SMU taught me that anything is possible, provided you have have enough money in a slush fund and jump ship before you get caught.” Former House Speaker Tom Delay, newly freed on bail while appealing his three-year sentence for money laundering the came behind James and told him, “No, seriously Craig. You gotta leave while the gettin’s good. Now, do you have any Gold Bond? This ankle bracelet’s really starting to chafe.”

• When asked about his former SMU backfield partner Eric Dickerson, James said that Eric had really wanted to run, but that, “he insisted that he continue to wear rec specs on the campaign trail and people thought he was kind of ‘tarded…that’s the right word? Right? Tarded? I don’t want to get in trouble or nothin.”

1. Age is just a number…A vitally important, non-negotiable number: Read the following sentence very slowly: The most Wins After Replacement a 1B or DH has ever been worth after the age of 31 is 46.5, by the Mariners Edgar Martinez. The highest WAR for a player after 31 belongs to Babe Ruth at 72.5⁴, which is still lower than his totals to date. Grantland’s Jonah Keri estimates that for Pujols to be worth the money the Angels are paying him this season, he has to be worth 6.5 Wins Above Replacement, almost a full Win Above Replacement higher than last year’s 5.4 WAR effort, which was Pujols’ worst posting of his career. To further illustrate the probable trajectory of Pujols’ career, you need only look at the only MLB player to sign a more lucrative contract than Pujols: Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod had a WAR of 89.7 at age 31, a mark that is nearly identical to Pujols’. Since his 32^nd birthday, A-Rod has racked up an average WAR of 3.74. Basically, what the L.A. Angels are expecting Phat Albert to do is defy the aging process, something that seems possible only with the aid of various illicit chemicals smuggled from China. All of this leads to my next point…
2. Show us your birth certificate…No, not that one, the other one: The beginning of Albert Pujols’ career airs on the auspicious side. After playing a grand total of 3 minor league games above the A/A+ level, Albert made the Cardinals roster in 2001 and proceeded not just to run away with Rookie of Year Honors, but to win a Silver Slugger and place 4^th in the NL MVP voting…all of this for a 21 year old with under a year of minor league experience. Also of import is where he was born: The Dominican Republic. Now, this might come off as racist or jingoistic, but I promise you it’s not. Had Albert’s parents immigrated to America or any other 1^st world nation prior to his birth, this wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is that The Dominican Republic, and more specifically its broad network of youth baseball academies are particularly adept at doctoring birth certificates to make their clients more marketable. Among the cadre of Dominican talent to take a few miles off of the odometer artificially are Miguel Tejada, Rafael Furcal, Adrian Beltre, Carlos Alvarez⁵, Ramon Antonio Pena Paulino, and a host of others. It is not out of the question to seriously consider the possibility that Albert is older than he claims to be, especially since he’s looks like he’s old enough to have sired half of the Angels roster.
   

   Pujols' Rookie Card - If that man was 21 then, he was probbly exposed to radiation as a child.

3. The Angels Still Aren’t the Best Team in their Division: Despite the defection of C.J. Wilson to Los Angelinos, the Texas Rangers are hands-down the best team in the AL West and have represented the American League in the World Series in back-to-back seasons. Last year they lost the best pitcher in all of baseball, Cliff Lee, and had better season than they did the year before. I will always bet on the devil I know before the one I don’t and I know the Rangers are a 90+ win ball club. I have no idea what the Angels are going to look like and everyone on their roster whose name doesn’t rhyme with Schmalbert Schmujols doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence.
4. The Steinbrenner Principle: As this year has proven, it is exceedingly difficult to buy yourself a championship. Philadelphia acquired Cliff Lee last off-season to create—along with Halladay, Oswalt, Hamels and that other guy—the Rotation of Doom only to get bounced by The Cardinals on their way to winning the fall classic. Across Patterson Ave. at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles’ newly assembled dream-team just got themselves eliminated from playoff contention by the Seattle F—ing Seahawks, falling to 4-8 or about $8.5 million dollars per win for offseason signings Nnamdi Asomugha, Jason Babin and Michael Vick⁶. Put it this way: The New York Yankees won 4 World Series titles in 5 years with Scott Brosius at third base and they’ve only won 1 in seven years after paying a King’s ransom for Alex Rodriguez to play third. I rest my case.
5. The Angels in the Outfield are AARP-Eligible Soon: Vernon Wells clocks in as the Angels youngest starting outfielder at the tender age of 33. Alongside him are the increasingly brittle bones of CF Torii Hunter (age 36) and RF Bobby Abreu (age 37). Someone needs to tell me why it’s a good idea to have three of your most arthritic players in positions where they need to sprint long distances on a frequent basis. Bobby Abreu’s body looks like it belongs in a Pro-Am Golf Tournament at this point in his career and if Torii Hunter actually tried one of the Spiderman at-the-wall grabs he’s known for I fear he might break a hip.
6. The Transitive Property of Ken Griffey Jr.: This is my final point and, while it may be influenced by almost a decade of bitterness and resentment, I still believe it to be sound. In 1999, The Cincinnati Reds were one win away from a wild card birth, losing to the New York Mets in a play-in game after the two clubs were tied in the standings after the regular season. In the off-season, the Reds signed Ken Griffey Jr. to a nine-year deal worth $112.5 million and the wouldn’t reach the playoffs for another 10 years, after Griffey was off taking naps in the Seattle Mariners’ dugout. There is an inherent danger to long-term contracts. They are built on the expectation that a player will at the very least maintain their form for an extended period of time and the later on they sign that contract, the scarcer the chances of fulfilling their end of the bargain. Griffey was the best player in baseball when he came over from Seattle and he quickly became the most disappointing. I’m not saying that Albert Pujols is going to tear his ACL 3 times in 5 years and gain 20 lbs of Wendy’s Triple Bacon Cheeseburger weight, but you never know what’s going to happen. And, at $254 million over ten years with no trade clause, I don’t envy Angels fans a bit.

3. Yes, that was me just copyrighting the term Baker’s Decade© to denote an 11 year period of time. I have no idea how copyright laws work, but do know when I type in parentheses-capital C-parentheses, it gives me one of these things: ©.

Finally...An Athlete!

He Just Looks Like He Should Have Been Named Socrates, Doesn't He?

Very few of those in the America outside of an isolated cult of soccer devotees had ever heard of Socrates and, thus, his death has created only the faintest of waves in our media. However, to those unfamiliar with the man, all they have to do is read his obituary to realize that there has never been anyone like him in the entirety of American sport. While playing in provincial clubs as a twenty-something, Socrates earned his nickname, “Doctor.” You would be forgiven for thinking that the moniker was derived from the surgical precision with which he handled the ball, and in part it was. However, the predominant impetus for Doctor Socrates came from the fact that the man earned his medical degree at the age of 24 and would go on to practice medicine after his career had ended. I am hard pressed to think of many other men who wore cleats and a stethoscope¹. When he wasn’t on the pitch or in the consulting room, Socrates was out advocating for his fellow soccer players and Brazillians, being a key member in the nation’s Pro-Democracy movement. Oh, and he also wrote newspaper columns, coached, painted and basically tried every artistic pursuit short of conducting. I’m sure Terry Bradshaw spends his time away from the FOX NFL Sunday set writing novels and leading grassroots political organizations too².

He looked just like his ancient, aristocratic name would suggest. At 6′ 4” his lanky frame lent a grace to his movements that only accentuated the artistic, playful style of the teams he captained. Running down the field he looked someone more at home in the plains of the Serengeti than on a soccer pitch, unlike his contemporary Diego Maradona, who somehow evoked the same beauty while storming thorough opposing back lines with a gait that suggested a freight train more than it did a gazelle.

Just look at this film of Socrates’ equalizing goal in Brazil’s second round loss to Italy in the 1982 World Cup. He takes the throw in and saunters downfield, sending a precision pass to Zico on the right flank. As Zico switches field back towards the eighteen, losing his man in the process, Socrates races past him on a run into the box and receives a gentle leading pass with just enough pace to set him up against the goalie. Then, instead of crossing it, Socrates sends the ball into the back of the net through the two foot gap between the keeper and the near post. That’s what our verbose announcing friends across the pond like to call “Fluid Football.” They take the most difficult and precise movements and make them look effortless. You could watch every single US Mens National Team game for a year and never see a goal remotely like that. And that’s not to pick on the Americans, who have improved so much as to become a legitimate international threat over the past decade. But, our game, a long with plenty of other nations, often involves winning ugly: muscling in headers off of set pieces, tapping in errant deflections and the old American stand-by of “Let’s kick he ball 80 yards down the field and hop one of our guys gets it.” It doesn’t matter how we win just so long as we do.

Earlier this year, American football legend Al Davis passed away. It was in his Machiavellian mantra “Just win, baby” that is the prevailing ethos of the western world and its sports teams. More than almost anyone in modern sport, Socrates rebelled against that notion. For him, and the Brazilian style of play that, if we are to believe Socrates himself, has been lost, it is the process that matters more than the outcome. If given the choice, Socrates would have rather lost beautifully than won blandly³, which is exactly what he did.

#1 LSU vs. #2 Alabama (Chance of happening: 50%):

No matter how much their athletic departments and fan bases might say, no one outside of the Deep South gives two shakes about a rematch of a game that was as slow as molasses heading uphill in winter. Any game that produces only three field goals, and one of those in overtime, isn’t anything I’d like to see repeated. Of course, this is most likely the matchup that we’re going to be watching in the BCS championship game, which only underscores the problems in the BCS⁴. No one wants to see the matchup between the two “best” teams in college football. We just want to see the most intriguing matchup and there’s nothing intriguing about LSU vs. Alabama, if for no other reason that intrigue requires speculation and anticipation, two things that are exceedingly difficult to drum up for two teams who played each other a couple months before. According to the objective, scientific ranking system formulated for the BCS, LSU and ‘Bama are the two best teams in football and they’re probably right. But science doesn’t make for good television. I wholeheartedly agree with Michael Weinreb, who argues in a recent column that Boise State vs. LSU is the most compelling title game match-up⁵. No one is saying that Boise State is the second best team in the country. All we’re pointing out is that Boise State vs. LSU would be must-see-TV that would draw casual fans into the audience and create the most compelling storylines. For anyone who doubts me, I invite you to watch the 2007 Fiesta Bowl again between Boise and Oklahoma. It is, without parallel, the single greatest football game I have ever been witness to and while LSU-Boise would almost certainly fall short of that night, it’s a far more interesting proposition than another SEC West game⁶.

#1 LSU vs. #3. Oklahoma State (Chance of Happening: 33%)

Aside from T. Boone Pickens and people with an irrational love of Wrangler jeans and Skoal, I can’t see the wide appeal in this game, even if the computers love the Okies and they have the advantage of being 0-0 against LSU this year. If the can beat their intrastate rivals this weekend than they might jump up enough in the polls to leapfrog Bama for the #2 spot. Really, Oak State represents the only legitimate threat to Bama’s title game hopes and, a old-fashioned ass-kicking of Oklahoma might put them over the top. Their defense allows over 450 yards of offense a game, but if I’m going to see a team lose to LSU, I’d rather they lose 52-45 than 6-3.

#1 LSU vs. #4 Stanford (chance of happening: 10%)

You would think the "Harvard of the West" could design a better mascot.

Stanford is perhaps the most enticing of the legitimate contenders for the #2 ranking. Andrew Luck has been the best player in college football for going on two years now and his Cardinal come in with solid poll numbers (#3 in the Harris and #4 in the USA Today/Coaches Poll). The only problem is that their loss to Oregon has left them out of the inaugural PAC-12 Championship Game and without recourse to increase their position. Two-loss Oregon has no chance of making the title game, but they can take comfort in the fact that they’ve likely ruined the any chance the Fighting Lucks had of reaching the title. On the plus side, this does leave open the possibility of Stanford vs. Michigan in The Fiesta Bowl, aka The Rose Bowl Everyone Wanted To See.

#1 LSU vs. #5 Virginia Tech (chance of happening: 6%)

This is no joke: If Va. Tech ends up playing the National Championship game, I am done with the BCS title game. The ACC is a joke of a conference, only out-shined by the hideous stench of failure given off by the Big East. Do you know who Virginia Tech’s biggest win was against this year? Do you? Georgia Tech! A team that isn’t even in the Top 25 now! They have only played one game this year against a Top 25 team, their ACC Championship foe Clemson, to whom they lost 23-3! How the fuck is this team ranked higher than Boise State and Houston?! Goddamnit anyway! I’m going against the sage advice of my high school journalism teacher and using entirely too many exclamation points but I don’t give a flying fuck because this is fucking ridiculous! And, now they’ll end up losing to Clemson in the ACC Championship game and the Orange Bowl is going to be a Clemson vs. West Virginia matchup that will get a Nielsen rating of .4 because the 48 other states in the union could give a shit about two teams that would finish smack dab in the middle of the SEC! There…I’m done. And I think I have an ulcer.

#1 LSU vs. #6 Houston (chance of happening: .9%)

It’s the simplest argument you’ll get: Houston is the only other undefeated team in the nation. So what if their Conference USA Championship matchup with #24 Southern Mississippi is their first game against a ranked opponent? They’d probably get smoked by LSU 99 out of 100 times, but they’d sure as hell make things interesting and the one game they won would be spectacular. If you haven’t watched Case Keenum run and gun the hell out of the ball this year, then do yourself a favor and watch the Conference-USA title game. The man’s setting NCAA records left and right and is a frontrunner for the Heisman Trophy this year. If nothing else, they’ll get a high-profile match-up against a Oregon or an Oklahoma and we’ll get to see what they’re made of/

#1 LSU vs. #7 Boise State (chance of happening: .1%)

A man can dream can’t he?

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He will be a good quarterback, but not a great one. It’s important that he have plenty of doubters and detractors so that he will have to prove himself through the many miracles of Tebow. Even if you leave in the story about being cut from his high school basketball team, there’s no way someone like Michael Jordan could be Jesus 2.0². The majority of the “greats” in any sport were unrepentant assholes or men so consumed with/defined by their own greatness that they could never be Jesus. Almost all transcendent athletes fall into the category of Greek Tragic Hero. If Sophocles wrote a drama about an American sports star, he might very well give us a story of a Heisman Trophy winning running back who goes on to movie stardom, murders his ex-wife and her boyfriend and gets acquitted of all charges only to get sent to prison a decade later for stealing memorabilia that he used to own. A people cannot identify with perfection; humanity lies within our shortcomings and not our virtues. If Tim Tebow had a flawless throwing motion, then he could never be Christ³. I’d bet anything that Jesus was, at best, an above average carpenter.

A Throwing Motion So Ugly It's Beautiful. Like a Rockfish or Something

After a sparkling resume in college replete with Heisman Trophies and National Titles, the people will still doubt him. God probably had to send the archangel Gabriel down to pay a visit to Josh McDaniels and convince him to take Tebow with the 25^th overall pick. Do you think it’s coincidence that Tebow landed in the most altitudinous city with an NFL franchise⁴? Once there, he will be spurned by those in power, who will say he’s too unconventional; that he could never win at this level. But the people will chant for their savior and, lo, the administrative powers that be will be forced to put him on the field, which is when the miracles will begin. People will forever talk of the way he slew the three-chinned beast Rex Ryan with his bootleg of glory or how he led his Broncos from 15 points back with just over five minutes to go to beat the Dolphins in overtime.

Now, I think it’s fairly apparent that there is a thick vein of facetiousness running through this article, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any truth in it. Tim Tebow is the most polarizing sports figure this country has seen since, perhaps Barry Bonds. The incredible thing is that normally these types of figures are polarizing for off-the-field actions of one sort or another. Do you think he’s juicing? Can you believe he got caught with 50 lbs of weed in the back of his car? I hear he’s got nine kids by seven different women. But, with Tebow, it’s not anything thing that he’s done, per se: it’s what he represents or what people believe he represents. If Tebow weren’t so open with his faith, then he would have, at best, regional interest with sparse national coverage. The number of times that backup quarterbacks have stepped into the starting role and run off a string of wins for a losing team are many and varied. This year we’ve had several examples of what I like to call the Bruce Coslet Corollary, pertaining to any mid-season replacement who proved a welcome change of pace only to suck mightily the following season⁵. Some prime candidates are former Buffalo Bills backup and Hahvard grad Ryan Fitzpatrick opening the season with a 4-1 record (he’s since gone 1-5) and Sexy Rex-y Grossman of the Washington Redskins, who led his team to a record of 3-1 before throwing enough picks against Philadelphia to make a man wonder if he was being paid under the table by Andy Reid and being benched in favor of the sixth greatest Mormon quarterback in NFL history, John Beck⁶. Neither of these guys have taken up much print this year because (almost) no one cares. I guarantee if John Beck went out and became an open polygamist and did a promotional campaign with the cast of HBO’s Big Love, then he’d be a story.

I’ve heard the argument that Tim Tebow is a shill for the Christian Right and that your feelings about him reflect your sociopolitical leanings and I resolutely declare that to be bullshit. Tim Tebow is the role model that parents, politicians and pastors say that all sports stars should be. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t fuck sluts, does charity work in the Philippines and is about as humble as you can expect a multi-million dollar athlete to be. The only catch is that he is super-duper Christian and occasionally does shit like appear in anti-abortion advertisements with his mom. When Tebow entered the league I was ambivalent if not slightly antagonistic towards him. Now, I am a Tebow convert who considers any game of his must-see TV. He makes no sense. His stats make sabermetricians eyes bleed and somewhere Don Coryell is rolling over in his grave because a man who throws a worse long ball than ½ of the quarterbacks in the College Football AP Top 25 is 5-1 as a starter. The Vice President of Football Operations for the Broncos and living legend John Elway looks visibly pained at times watching Tebow play, but he can’t take him out and he can’t complain because all the kid does is win. So what if the only offense he can run was last implemented by Knute Rockne? He’s the best thing to happen to the game of football in a long time and here’s to hoping we can get enough divine intervention to keep this ride going a little longer.