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To whom it may concern:

I have followed this team for years, and I will continue to do so. In all my years of following, I have never seen you make even one playoff appearance. I remember all the attempts at rebuilding, the subsequent tearing down and rebuilding again.

I believed in 2010 that you ought to draft Tim Tebow. Instead, you drafted a running back who you almost never use. Whatever. But rejoice, for Fate has granted you a second chance! For some reason, John Elway doesn’t like Tebow, and is trying to get Peyton Manning or Brandon Weeden.

While I have long thought that Tebow is highly overrated as a quarterback, and the phony religious war that the press tries to create around him is quite tiresome, I nonetheless think he is exactly who the team needs.

This is because he has an indefinable quality–charisma, you might call it–that attracts attention. And attention is what you desperately need as a ball club. Nobody even talks about Buffalo, or if they do, it’s to talk about how lacking it is, both as a city and a place of sporting success.

So, that’s why you ought to trade for Tebow. Trade them the first-round pick if they want it. You probably were planning to use it on yet another running back, anyway. Or, even worse, some overrated wide-receiver. And if they still won’t make with the Chosen One, give them C.J. Spiller. He was effective at warming the bench behind Jackson, so he’s more than qualified to warm it behind Moreno.

It is true that Tim Tebow cannot throw a football correctly. (Personally, I have long suspected that he isn’t really left-handed.) But he has some sort of miraculous ability to excite people beyond reason, and besides that, he has a knack for winning in the 4th quarter, which is something that this team hasn’t had since Frank Reich left.

If Denver signs Manning, get Tebow. If they don’t sign Manning, get Tebow anyway, since they’ve demonstrated they don’t have faith in him. You say you’re committed to Fitzpatrick, but a little competition never hurt anyone. Well, except the loser, but do you really want to be a haven for losers?

Get Tebow. I don’t know if he’ll continue his habit of pulling out miraculous victories, but at least he’s theoretically capable of it. And even if he doesn’t, people will at least pay attention to the team again.

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The New Orleans Saints are in rather a lot of trouble for their recently discovered “bounty” program, in which defenders were paid to injure opposing players.

Unsurprisingly, lots of pro players have said that this sort of thing goes far beyond this one team, and is quite common throughout the league. I can readily believe it.

It’s rare for a game to go by without hearing some analyst say “they must rattle the quarterback”, or they must “apply pressure to the quarterback” or something like that. Well, that means they need to try really hard to hit the quarterback. Because he’s an essential player in a team’s offense. That’s an accepted piece of strategy; and how much of a stretch is it from that to paying bounties to injure important players?

The reason New Orleans got caught, I suspect, is that they were too obvious about it. The institutionalized nature of the system was what exposed them. I bet the investigations will discover that such programs exist on other teams, but are less regulated and probably involve less tangible benefits as payments.

Even if the league managed to curtail all forms of material payment for these things, there would still very likely be an unspoken respect for those players who knock out and opponent’s star. It seems, from my outsider’s perspective, that it would be practically inevitable, given how the game works.

Suppose they hadn’t had a bounty system, but had just, in the course of the game, injured Brett Favre anyway in the Conference Championship two years ago. How bad could you feel about it if you were a member of the Saints? I mean, yeah, it would be a shame to hurt a fellow player, but the inescapable fact is that it makes achieving the goal of winning a championship significantly easier.

In criminal cases, the old trope is that the perpetrators need “motive and opportunity”. Well, clearly the motive is to win ball games. And because of the nature of the game, it’s remarkably easy to injure the opponent without appearing to mean to. In fact, it’s a requirement that you take actions that might well injure people to play the game.

Consequently, since all the incentives are there, and since it’s extremely easy to do, it would be kind of surprising if this didn’t go on. Highly lamentable, but not surprising.