Skip to main content
opinion
Open this photo in gallery:

Tennessee Titans quarterback Ryan Tannehill passes during an NFL football practice on Jan. 17, 2020, in Nashville, Tenn. The Titans are scheduled to face the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship game Sunday.Mark Humphrey/The Associated Press

On the spectrum of things the NFL would have liked to see happen in the Super Bowl – from ‘Tom Brady returns kickoff 105 yards to cement comeback victory’ to ‘International Space Station crashes into stadium during national anthem’ – Ryan Tannehill lies closer to the latter outcome.

Tannehill is the quarterback of the suddenly ascendant Tennessee Titans, who play the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC championship on Sunday. In football stardom terms, he is a man of no qualities.

He looked good during his six seasons in Miami … whenever he was standing on the sidelines without a helmet. Right size, right jawline, right forgettable personality.

But he wasn’t much good on the field. Tannehill had an often hilarious capacity for confusion. Quarterback may be the hardest position to play in sports because, more than any other, it can make elite athletes look ridiculous. Tannehill, 31, made it look harder and more ridiculous than just about anyone else.

The Dolphins jettisoned him in the off-season. The Titans picked him up as insurance. He was given away for a fourth-round draft pick. Considering the value put on quarterbacks in modern football, this is like swapping a Mercedes for a set of Mercedes tires. You wouldn’t want to look too closely under the hood.

But in the early going, with Tennessee’s golden boy, Marcus Mariota, doing his best Ryan-Tannehill-in-Miami impression, the actual Tannehill was given the starting job. And things suddenly started going right.

Tennessee sneaked into the playoffs behind an old-school, pile-driving offensive scheme. Tannehill’s role in it is to be efficient rather than excellent. Efficiency suits him, apparently. No cause to run around like a man being chased by wild dogs. No need to think too hard. No pressure.

Having made the postseason, Tennessee was meant to serve as an amuse-bouche for the New England Patriots. But the Titans won that game.

That was a blow. With Brady freed to climb Kilimanjaro or go parasailing, or whatever it is that famous rich guys with supermodel wives do when they’re on sabbatical, the NFL’s best marketing pitch was out the window.

Instead, they had a schmuck only football obsessives know much about, and as a result, care for very little.

Next, the Titans were meant to be a drum beaten by the league’s newest quarterbacking star, Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson. The Titans won that one even more convincingly.

Now Tannehill had cost the league the alpha and omega of its glamour position and its two simplest human selling points.

A course recalculation was required.

So in the space of a couple of days, Tannehill has gone from a statistical curiosity no one had any feelings about to shining proof that all things are possible in all possible worlds.

It’s quite something to watch the NFL and the machinery that bolsters it – broadcasters, media, fans – turn the narrative 180 degrees in a few hours.

He is suddenly the subject of fawning profiles and mass curiosity. Unfortunately, one of the things that has not changed about Tannehill is his elite ability to deflect interest.

He still talks like an intern working in the public-relations department at an insurance company. Which leads to him saying things such as, “I love competing. Whether football or board games, I love to win.”

(I suppose this means he went six years without winning a meaningful game of Scrabble, despite devoting his life to the practice of it.)

But for the moment, Tannehill doesn’t need to be fascinating. He needs to shut up and fill a promotional hole. Other people more skilled at this sort of thing will do the hard work for him.

All of Tannehill’s faults as a player are now proof he was criminally misused. He’s no longer the average-to-sub-average player we saw for years and years in Miami. He’s actually the guy who’s had a good run for a dozen-or-so games this season. He is that perennial favourite of the sports-industrial complex – someone who was chewed up by the system.

A couple of weeks ago, Tannehill and Tennessee were a promotional nightmare for the NFL. Now they’re the thing on which the Super Bowl’s underdog narrative rests.

This is the point in a sports column when you might expect some sort of declarative sentence about how this will turn out. But this column has swung, missed and then fallen over, smashed its face on the plate and been knocked unconscious for two weeks running.

First, it predicted a magisterial and inevitable closing act for Brady. Then it tried the same thing with Jackson, albeit an opening act. So far, that’s an O-fer.

This led to some deep thought … about moving to Las Vegas and starting a cooling consultancy. Make predictions. Sell that info to casinos. Have them go terribly wrong. Get rich betting against ourselves.

So while it’s tempting to say Tannehill’s Jesus-and-the-rock act collapses Sunday against Kansas City, we are not saying that. Certainly not betting on it. The arc of the universe bends, but who knows in what direction?

Or maybe we are? We’re just not saying out loud any more. This way we can always be right, post facto.

As it stands, the NFL is balanced on the edge of four competing storylines – nostalgia (Aaron Rodgers and Green Bay), emergence (Jimmy Garoppolo and San Francisco), arrival (Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City) and out-of-nowhere’ism. (Tannehill & Co.).

The Titans remain the least compelling because people will assume the Super Bowl becomes a walkover if they’re in it.

It can only be best in retrospect, and if they win it. They are now the contrarian’s pick, the ahistorical pick and the one least likely to result in an ‘heir to Brady’ narrative going forward.

In short, they are the worst outcome for the NFL. Which makes them the best for people like me who can’t pick football.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe