Tebowmania Concludes in Denver

36 year old Peyton Manning chooses the Denver Broncos as his next team, which means that likely Tim Tebow is on the trading bloc, Mike Silver of Yahoo sports reports:

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Two of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history just hooked up on a “Go” route for the ages, and there’s no question which one feels like walking around with his arms raised to the heavens in celebration.

No matter what Peyton Manning does as a Denver Bronco, John Elway just threw the executive’s equivalent of a game-winning touchdown pass.

Elway, since taking over as the Broncos’ top football executive 14 months ago, has been looking for a quarterback befitting of his Hall of Fame legacy, or at least someone doing a decent impersonation. Instead, thanks to an against-the-grain decision by the prior regime and a stunning series of dramatic developments during the surreal 2011 season, he got Tebowmania – and it wasn’t going away.

And thanks to Manning’s equally extraordinary divorce from the Indianapolis Colts, Elway saw an opening – a bold, emphatic way to rid himself of Tim Tebow without causing an insurrection in the Rockies.

True to his nature, the old gunslinger seized it, going all out in his pursuit of Manning, with whom he surely connected on a level none of us can understand.

On Monday, Elway learned that he’d found his target, with Manning choosing the Broncos over the Tennessee Titans and San Francisco 49ers. To say the reaction at the Broncos’ Dove Valley training facility was one of jubilation would be an understatement. Sure, the notion of landing one of the greatest players in league history was a pick-me-upper. However, there was also a decided ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead strain to the exultation, as unfair and irrational as that may seem.

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“Peyton Manning allows John Elway and the Broncos to wash their hands clean of Tim Tebow,” the headline above Silver’s story blurts out with an obvious anti-Christian dig, even though Silver, a former Sports Illustrated writer, does a pretty good job of controlling his own biases in the article.

In a way, Elway’s career has come full circle — he was the successor to Craig Morton, the former Dallas Cowboys starter, who was released when Roger Staubach emerged as a superstar in the early 1970s. After stopping for a cup of coffee in New York, Morton found redemption with Broncos, taking them to their first Super Bowl at the conclusion of the 1977 season (where they lost to Morton’s former team). Now Elway as the Broncos’ general manager is placing his team’s current Super Bowl aspirations on the arm of another 30-something quarterback, who may or may not be damaged goods.

Will Elway get the job done and end his playing career, as Elway did, with another Super Bowl ring in Denver? And what will happen next with Tebow? Did Tebow’s religious proselytizing speed his demise with a team he took into the playoffs?

Toss the rhetorical pigskin around in the comments below.

(Thumbnail on Lifestyle blog homepage assembled from multiple Shutterstock.com images.)

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