Tim Tebow Schadenfreude

I thought I despised Tim Tebow before.

But now, as you may have already heard, He's about to appear in an anti-abortion Super Bowl commercial. The ad, which will cost between $2.5 and $2.8 million, discusses the story of His miraculous birth.

You see, his 37-year-old mother was in the Phillippines on a mission, when she was diagnosed with placental abruption. Doctors normally recommend abortion in this case, because it poses not just a danger to the child (15-20% mortality rate in third-world countries like the Phillippines) but also a danger to the mother (5% mortality rate.) Additionally, nearly 50% of the babies are born underweight and premature, with other complications at more than double their normal rate of occurrence. But she decided against abortion, and she was blessed with the Eminently Marketable Tim Tebow for a son!

Of course, these stories have a built-in survivor bias, because you never hear from the dead babies and dead mothers who made the same choice and prayed just as hard as Pam Tebow did. The mothers who orphaned living children and widowed living husbands, foolishly risking their own lives to obey the rules of a nonexistent supreme being, are conveniently silent about the consequences of their choice.

But ok, I'm going to put aside my non-belief for a moment. Just for the sake of argument, let's take every word in the Bible as the pristine truth.

When Jesus was alive, he was a part of the Roman Empire, a republican government that closely mirrors our current government in many important ways. Did Jesus make a single trip to Rome, to lobby the senators for more Christian laws? Did he take donations and save them up to try and curry favor with politicians? Did he instead lobby local politicians - like Pontius Pilate or the Pharisees for political change?

You may not have read the Bible as closely as I have, but instinctively you know the answer to these questions. Jesus gave money to the poor and encouraged others to do so; he witnessed on a personal level and encouraged his disciples to do the same. He never made any effort to influence politicians or laws.

And yet, Focus on the Family has saved up $2.5 million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad with Tim Tebow's face on it. Think Jesus would approve? Think he would have denied food to starving children so that he could air a television ad hoping to affect political change?

And Our Media Hero is right at the head of the whole hypocritical scheme, translating his success as a football player into a platform for his evangelical beliefs.

So it is with great delight that I watched him suck at the Senior Bowl. If you can't follow that link (sub required, I think), it grades Tebow's week as a D+.

We have not spoken to a single talent evaluator who believes Tebow can develop into the kind of quarterback Mark Sanchez, Matthew Stafford or Joe Flacco is right now. The learning curve is just too steep in almost every area. We cannot find a way to give him any higher than a third-round grade, and even then we envision him as nothing more than a Wildcat or short-yardage quarterback who could move to H-back. Overall, Senior Bowl week could not have gone worse from an on-the-field standpoint.

This means that he'll soon (hopefully) fade into obscurity, since no one wants to hear a tight end proselytise.