Prepare For Discourse
Dillion Gabriel got concussed in week 11’s game against Baltimore. This meant one thing: Shedeur time.
Shedeur is a 5th-round pick, who has spent much of the season dealing with a back injury, unable to practice. He wasn’t getting practice reps with the scout team, and certainly not getting any reps with the starters. He was now thrust into the game and told to manage the house for the second half. The Browns were winning at the time. The results? He looked like a 5th round pick who hasn’t had much practice time forced to play in a game he wasn’t expecting to play in. It was ugly. It was so ugly that everyone watching football briefly stopped making fun of JJ McCarthy and Sam Darnold to make fun of the new disaster.
The takes, of course, were dumb.
Shedeur is not a Quarterback. Shedeur is a celebrity who happens to be a Quarterback. It’s just Tebow again. While the Shedeur discourse was minimal over the recent weeks due to him simply not playing (and also being hurt), it was always going to be a firestorm once he mattered again and got on the field. I feel bad for the kid at this stage, because he’s not even a person to most of the people who worship him and stan for him. He’s an icon. A pawn of the culture war. A gift. A savior. He is everything. He cannot fail, he can only be failed. If he struggles, it’s the team’s fault. It’s the coaching staff for failing him and using him improperly. It’s the Browns bad roster. It’s the haters. It’s racism. A lot of these points will be made by people who do not understand ball very well or how football operates, and they will be parroting other people who slightly do. Even the valid points will be drowning in bad faith usage of those points. They will go to war for this kid who has no idea they exist.
That popularity and celebrity worship has resulted in the expected counter-balance of hate and snark. None of us are immune. You end up on one side or another, and on the internet it tends to be the other. Shedeur the person and the player hardly matters. During the Tebow years much of my frustration wasn’t at Tebow himself; outside finding him annoying I was mostly indifferent to him. His rabid fanbase is what made me root against him and delight in his failures. Just this year I have found myself rooting against JJ McCarthy, despite him playing for my second-favorite team, simply because for several weeks he also had a huge number of very annoying stans who would show up under any joke or comment you made. McCarthy has been so visibly bad that those people have quieted down as of late. But the JJ McArmy is weak in comparison to the Shedeur Vanguard. The problem is exponential.
It’s so bad that in Kurt Warner’s weekly QB film breakdown video, he feels the need to spend the first 5 minutes making it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR he wishes nothing but success for Shedeur and every QB, and is just trying to be as neutral as possible when reviewing him. Just to brace himself against the horde. I’ve never seen him feel the need to do that.
I’m trying my absolute hardest to try and not judge Shedeur either way, because he deserves to be judged for his actual play and the position he is in. But that’s not going to be easy, because it will always be fun to see people you find annoying get owned. It’s a toxic trait the internet has truly poisoned us with. No matter what happens on Sunday against the Raiders, it’s gonna be a minefield. None of it will be particularly fair. It’s one game. He’s a rookie. Unless he goes out there and puts up a historic anomaly of a game (positive OR negative), this week will probably tell us very little. The Ravens game told us very little. He will have plenty of somewhat valid excuses on his side if he struggles, which is the most likely scenario.
And yes, provided nothing happens between now and the game keeping him from starting, he will get his Hydra head.
It’s really more than that, in this case, because of the elephant in the room… his dad. Tebow was just Tebow. He grew up… that way. And then simply went forth into the world and got caught up in the churn.
But… this kid. *cue muddled barely understandable Temu Darth Vader Bane Accent* Most people adopted the egomaniacal narcissism. He was bawwwwn in it, moooolded by it!
*ahem* Yea, Deion ruined this kid, straight up. He was a failure as a father, and these are the fruits of his own ruination. I can’t hate Shedeur. He’s the ultimate victim here. He was taught how to act, how to behave, I’m not sure if he has become a narcissist now, but I’m seeing a lot… I guess I’d call it puppetry. He’s doing things that he was taught, but there’s a weird disconnect in how much he’s really investing in them. At least, that’s my read. He might as well have been kidnapped and kept in a bunker under the ocean for 20 years with no knowledge of how humans behave, and then one day he’s freed and now we’re all laughing at him for not knowing how it’s supposed to work.
Now, straight up, I’ve hated Deion my entire life. I hated him as a player because he was good. I hated him as a person on the field and off because he was an unrepenting egomaniacal a*#$hole. But as a father? Holy crap, he has BLOWN AWAY my original reasons for hating him and provided me with a new one.
Actually, I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Last of the Mohicans, with a few tweaks… “When the Big Mouth is dead, the internet will eat his heart. Before he dies, the internet will put his children under the knife, so the Big Mouth will know his seed is wiped out forever.”
It’s lonzo ball all over again. I never had anything against lonzo, but DAMN did I want him to fail just to shut his dad up.
Me verbatim but with Bronny. Dude looks like a ghost who got his personal identity & soul forced out of him by his father, like a diet Todd Marinovich
Worth noting, with Tebow too… he came into the league with a VERY LARGE “I’m Jesus’ and Christianity’s Chosen Football Player” mentality. Like, he did the whole bible verses in eyeblack thing and the league was like, “We don’t allow any messages in eyeblack” and the entire southern christian nation and Tebow took it personally. He then started doing a genuflect in the endzone, and it even got called Tebowing, and he did it so often that the league was starting to say “Hey, you can’t do this all the time, it’s considered taunting after a point” and then yet again, the white christian explosion went off about how the league was “anti Christian.” And he rode that hype.
When he got cut, he made it clear he thought part of the reasons he got cut was because he’s just too much a christian and that those abortion supporters just didn’t want him around.
Like, seriously. Tebow brought his Daddy into it too.
Yeah, I remember when Pat Robertson said that god might reinjure Peyton Manning’s neck as punishment for trading Tebow. Absolute levels of insanity.
I avoided the entire Tebow saga like the plague. Ugh, did he actually participate in it directly? I never knew that. If so, then yea, screw him, too! DA JOIK! Having grown up in a strongly Christian household, I feel comfortable offending whoever feels offended by me saying it’s REALLY annoying how some Christians out there have a real victim complex after being confronted about spending their lives shoving their faith down everyone else’s throats. You don’t get to act offended when people tell you to stop acting like you have the authoritahhh to force everyone else to follow your faith.
I’m just here for the hydra head, Dave. I’m glad you cleared that up.
Many NFL fans flock to the first young prodigy the moment a clip of them balling out is shown—whether it’s a backup QB or a recent college inductee. And if your daddy happens to be a household name in the football world, you’re automatically guaranteed to have a cult following of well-wishers and haters. It’s interesting how we all pounce on a player for ONE bad throw or ONE amazing throw. (This can be the same for a WR with catches and all other positions and such) I feel sorry for this kid because he’s being examined under a microscope by both sides of the argument, and both pick apart the tinniest detail and dissect it
I know Vikings fans who bitch about JJ being their savior one week, and then the cause of their problems the next. You have to look at everything as a whole to get a clear picture, which nobody really does because the present performance is “the only thing that matters”
I’m neutral in this Shedeur argument, and I hope that the Raiders loose, because I fucking hate the Raiders (Go Chargers)
The biggest problem is going to be that he NEEDS ~3 years of coaching before he can even be fairly evaluated running an NFL offense. The college game is not the same with the different field dimensions and different rules. College QBs enter the league lacking several critical skills because they just are not necessary for the college meta. Shedeur is the most college-ass qb that ever college-assed their way into the NFL.
Shedeur Sanders is going to suck out loud on Sunday, and it will mean close to nothing.
Well I was wrong.
Shedeur was not terrible. He was not good, but he flashed. He looked like a rookie with possible upside. Considering the travelling circus that brought us here, I would call that a win for Shedeur Sanders.
Can someone explain the whole Shadeur thing to me? Why does ha have so many Stans? Like with Tebow he was a tremendous leader of men and won the chip in college and somehow magicked his way to comebacks in the nfl. Shadeur… exists? I’m not terribly online so I legitimately need someone to give me a short explanation of why Shadeur has this cult following
Deion toes the line of the alpha dudebro man sphere of things. So guys really into that stuff are really into him. There’s additional fear from the media about criticizing Shedeur because Trump is a big fan and if he’s bored, he might just start roasting some random sports talking head on Truth Social.
Just want to say I am a huge Sanders supporter but I hate all the alpha adjacent stuff. Deion Sanders was just one of my all time favorite players. I’ve always loved when players in sports are outwardly cocky and braggadocios instead of the fake humble routine. But in wrestling as a kid I tended to prefer the heels over the faces. But yeah there’s Sanders fans who aren’t conservative bro dudes.
To add to your point, I don’t think that you have to be conservative to be one of the bro dudes and into the alpha stuff? I think any man who feels low self esteem can fall into that, it crosses all political boundaries.
HYDRA WATCH: Ever since the Browns had six QBs on their roster back in August, things have shaken down to more reasonable levels. Huntley was cut and Pickett was traded around the end of preseason (no big surprise, but both missed a chance to join the hydra). And Flacco was traded to the Bengals, but he was 37th on the hydra anyway.
The current Browns roster (https://www.clevelandbrowns.com/team/players-roster/) has Dillon Gabriel, Shedeur Sanders, Creepazoid (inactive of course), and Bailey Zappe on the practice squad. Creepazoid is on the hydra despite morality and common sense, Zappe was 40th in Week 18 last season, Gabriel was 41st, and Sanders is still pending 42nd.
HYDRA FORECAST: Well, we have two literal rookies here and the general situation around them does not look great so far. My best guess is whoever looks worse by preseason next year gets shipped off somewhere so the team can focus on the other’s development. The remaining guy struggles to develop, because this is the Browns, so he eventually gets sent elsewhere too, and by 2027 the QB room is filled with more journeymen backup-level guys and/or the next crop of poor rookies. By the time the New Browns reach 30 years old at the end of the 2028-29 season, the hydra will be at least 47 strong.
The last panel goes hard
The thing with him for me is twofold. One, he’s never played under anyone but his father, and his father favored him in every way possible to put him in the position to get all the accolades possible. His father pushed to retire his uniform after basically one good year at Colorado. His father cut the playbook at Colorado to 1/2 to 1/4 the plays and simplified the complexity so that his son could actually run an offense. His father insisted and taught the sack taking and IG’ing that allowed him to have amazingly killer passer ratings in college. His father pushed on his contacts throughout sports media to get him opportunities that anyone else with that level of skill would never have.
So that’s thing one, and I can hardly even blame him. Parents would do almost anything to see their kids get the best opportunities they can. It’s hard to blame a parent for doing that.
Thing two is more about him and how he behaves. He skipped combine for some teams. He acted haughty in interviews. He refused to take the wonderlic. He apparently couldn’t run the scout squad for the Browns. I think he absolutely cares and is a hard worker, no doubt, but I also think nobody has been honest with this kid his entire life and he refuses to listen or believe what reality is showing him. And that’s frustrating and annoying to watch happen.
And then, when people call out about it, or people say “Hey, look,this is just the reality of the situation, the kid’s not an NFL QB and probably never will be.”, the response goes straight to “Well, you’re racist.” And that accusation will rile anyone. Tim Tebow wasn’t good either for almost exactly the same hyped reasons, and I didn’t see a lot of racism accusations being thrown around there.
In the end, we’ll probably only have to worry about this a few more weeks and then he’ll be dropped and this will move on.
time for the Clowns to reap the rewards of wasting a draft pick on an obvious bad idea
I *feel* you re: Tebow – during those years I couldn’t hate on my team (ok, I could), but never understood the stans. At this point there are still some of those goofbags wearing Tebow jerseys to home games like it’s some sort of badge of pride.