MMQB Review: Peter King Doesn't Get This Whole "Anne Frank House" Thing Edition

I think this is the last week Peter King is going to be writing his MMQB for a few weeks so we should treasure every self-involved, elitist word that he writes. Last week Peter prepared us emotionally for a month or so of no MMQB's, at least I believe so, and we will be stuck with his mini-MMQBs about soccer for a while. This week Peter has a few NFL thoughts he wants to talk about before he starts covering the World Cup. One of those things he wants to talk about is Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos.

Peter King has talked about Tim Tebow once since he was drafted by the Broncos in April. That's not enough. How is Tebow doing in the quarterback contest for the Broncos, what kind of leader is he being, and does Peter need to send him a care package? These are the things we need to know.

It's fall here at the bottom of Africa, which gives the region a bit more of a football feel. And futbol too, of course. But before I get to the business of covering the World Cup later this week -- hopefully I'll find some good coffee by then -

Fuck you South Africa your inability to meet Peter's standards for coffee. Between the policing of sex trafficking, racial tensions and preparations for the World Cup you didn't have time to build a Starbucks or two? Peter will not recommend you to his wealthy friends and singlehandedly destroy your tourism industry or just destroy your reputation like he did to the Mariott last summer.

Josh McDaniels has the future of Tim Tebow in his hands, as you all know, after choosing him late in the first round of the 2010 draft.

I regret ever complaining about Peter over-covering an NFL athlete. He is going to oversaturate us all with his coverage of Tim Tebow that will make what he used to do in regard to Brett Favre and Peyton Manning look like child's play. Just imagine how bad it will get if Tebow is really successful in the NFL. Tim Tebow appears to be a great guy, but this small feature on Tebow is the second time since April Peter King has done a feature on Tim Tebow.

And McDaniels has an interesting assistant: his younger brother who turned 30 on Sunday, is the quarterbacks coach this season.

Tim Tebow doesn't need a quarterback coach. He teaches the quarterback coach how to coach quarterbacks.

I was in Denver recently to write a Broncos story for SI, and saw the brothers in action tutoring their quarterback group -- which lost one of its members Friday with the waiving of last year's rookie prospect Tom Brandstater (Josh McDaniels wanted all the minicamp reps to go to Kyle Orton, Brady Quinnand Tebow, and the Broncos thought they might have seen Brandstater's ceiling already.)

Brandstater's ceiling apparently? 3rd string quarterback.

Somewhere Woody Paige is screaming that the Broncos should have stuck it out with Tom Brandstater and traded Kyle Orton. IT MAKES SENSE DAMMIT! You want to put your team's immediate future in the hands of three inexperienced quarterbacks.

Say what you want about having an inexperienced guy coaching the presumptive franchise quarterback day to day, but if the head coach wants his methods to be translated exactly the way he wants, isn't he going to be more comfortable with a coach who knows those methods better than anyone else in the world except him?

"Say what you will about having someone who has never coached an NFL quarterback before, but if an NFL head coach seems insistent on making sure his team regresses from year-to-year, doesn't it make sense to choose a guy who knows exactly how quickly he wants the team to regress?"

I think it is funny that Peter justifies Josh McDaniels' decision to hire his brother by saying that his brother will know exactly how Josh McDaniels wants his quarterbacks coached. It is as if Peter is saying it doesn't matter if either brother knows what he is doing, as long as they agree on how to do it.

"Coach Ben's a great coach,'' said Tebow. "Very passionate. You can tell he loves coaching and he knows precisely what he wants to get across. I believe in him."

I think it is hilarious that Tebow says he believes in his quarterback coach. For some reason I feel like Ben McDaniels should be believing in Tim Tebow more than Tebow should be believing in Ben McDaniels.

Josh McDaniels bristled when I asked about nepotism. "Last year, I asked Ben to come in for an interview for the offensive assistant job,'' he said. "Five guys interviewed, and I told him he'd have an equal chance to get the job. He came in and clearly was the best candidate for the job. Period.

This proves nothing. This story could be the very definition of nepotism. Josh McDaniels interviewed a bunch of candidates and it turns out he thinks his brother is the best candidate that interviewed for the job. Possibly, McDaniels could be thinking his brother is the best candidate for the job because he is his brother. I think that's the definition of nepotism or close enough.

Going back to high school, people would talk about nepotism [about the brothers starting at quarterback under their father]. Well, we lost nine games in six years with us quarterbacking.

I think there is a difference is being a great quarterback and being a great coach. So simply because they both did well in high school doesn't mean they both will do well in the NFL as a coach. I am not saying Ben McDaniels will not succeed, but the reasons for his potential success in the NFL that are being given aren't exactly swaying me right now.

I have a feeling Tebow will get a real chance to win the job this year, and whether he wins or loses, he will have some red-zone and short-yardage chances. Early and often.

I have a feeling Peter King's feeling about Tebow's shot at winning the starting quarterback job begins in his white quarterback loving heart. Tim Tebow isn't God to sportswriters, he is a god among gods. The Zeus of quarterbacks if you will. Screw it, let's just elect him to the Hall of Fame right now.

I don't want to say the Broncos are going to have a bad year in 2010, but has anyone but Broncos fans noticed that since McDaniels began coaching the Broncos he has essentially made them a worse team? Maybe the record last year wasn't much worse than when Shanahan was with the Broncos, but it feels like the offense is regressing. Mike Shanahan got fired after the 2008 year and since then McDaniels has traded away the skill position players Shanahan had (though improving the defense) and replaced them with players who are unproven in the NFL. The Broncos may have a good year, but McDaniels seems intent on building an NFL team the contrarian way.

I just finished rewriting a few sections of my Monday Morning Quarterback book for a paperback version, and in doing so I gained some new respect forTony Gonzalez.

Chapter 11- Men are From Venus, Women are From Mars, Tim Tebow is From Planet Sexiness

Chapter 12- Advice for Finding Good Coffee in a Country Full of Poor People

Chapter 13- What the Hell Is Up With This Anne Frank House?

Gonzalez is 34. In his first 13 NFL seasons he missed two games due to injury. He has more catches (999) than any other tight end in history. By far. But what interests me is this: In his first 10 seasons in football, he averaged 72.1 catches a year. In his past three, his average is 92.7.

It always makes me interested when sportswriters are among the last ones to figure out an NFL player is good. Falcons and Chiefs fans have noticed the best tight end in the history of the NFL is playing now, but Peter has to stumble accidentally on this information to notice this.

Flew from the top of the world (Amsterdam) to the bottom (Cape Town) Saturday, and it's amazing how much you can do when you're not in the mood to watch TV for 11 hours and 13 minutes. Well, I did watch an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (the one where Rosie O'Donnell beats up Larry, and Larry inadvertently takes two dates in wheelchairs to a recital) and one of The Office (the Andy-Angela wedding-planning episode), but other than that I read. Got fully up to speed on the World Cup, thanks to writers Grant Wahl Mark Bechteland editor Mark Mravic's fantastic preview of the Cup in this week's SI.

It's good to see before he covers the World Cup for Sports Illustrated Peter King puts as much research into figuring out what is going on in the world of soccer as anyone who wants to pick the winner of each game in a fantasy league would do (I read that preview in SI to prepare my picks for the Yahoo World Cup picks I am doing). It was a good preview, but I am not sure if it was good enough to get a person fully up to speed on the World Cup.

Also had the opportunity to see the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam Friday. It was a bit of a disappointment. There was no context. No real attempt to show the place exactly as it was. There were lots of signs, no furniture, short videos and never a sense of what it was like to live there.

I think that's the point. Few people would/could ever know what it is like to live in the attic of a house afraid of being discovered or else his/her entire family would be taken away and killed for being Jewish. The point is there is no way to know what it was like to live there. Unless Peter King wants someone to lock him in an enclosed space for a year or so and force him to be quiet when visitors enter the house or else he will be killed. I am assuming he doesn't want to do this.

Would an ottoman or a slide show about the Holocaust have made Peter "feel" the Anne Frank House? Is the fact she lived in the attic of that house RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM while hiding from the Nazis not enough for him to comprehend the situation. I haven't ever been there, but I don't know what a couch and a sign that says, "this is where Anne Frank sat" would do.

And, frankly (pun intended), no moment of terrible sadness and grief for her like you feel when you read her diary. I kept trying to understand what it was really like but could never feel it.

I think that is part of the point. You aren't supposed to understand, but you are supposed to try to feel what it is like to be trapped in an enclosed space for a long period of time living in fear for your life. Normal humans could at least envision what this would be like...but not Peter King.

We tried to sail to Robben Island Sunday to see where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison,

"I didn't get the sense of sadness about the prison I thought I would. There was no one in the prison anymore and the prison didn't seem as bad as I had envisioned it. It just seemed like a closed down cheap resort...like the Mariott."

Only Peter King can be so brazen as to spend half of his summer of 2009 complaining that a hotel didn't keep his reservation, but not feel any emotion when he visits the Ann Frank House in Amsterdam in summer of 2010. He lives in this little bubble where his major inconveniences are so incredibly minor to other people, which he doesn't realize, and for some reason he needs visuals to feel the emotion at a house where a well-known Holocaust survivor stayed hiding from the Nazis.

Reading about Wooden reminded me of the Bill Belichick life story in a different way but with the same parental influence.

When I hear about John Wooden, my mind immediately goes to Bill Belichick. For me, they are like father and son.

What was the similar ways that Belichick's life story reminded Peter of John Wooden's life story? That they were both white guys, had parents, and ended up coaching in sports.

1. I think it's not surprising to hear the Patriots and Tom Brady taking longer than expected to get to the altar on a new deal, and as Yahoo's Mike Silver wrote the other day, there may be a cooling of the historically very warm relationship between Brady and the team.

It was surprising a couple weeks ago when Peter wrote an entire article on this situation and didn't mention what Mike Silver talked about once. Sure, NOW Peter King chooses to acknowledge that there may be more to the Tom Brady-Patriots story than he portrayed in his fantasy tale a few weeks ago where he completely neglected to mention the Patriots may not be cool with Brady is training in California during the summer.

Let me give you a little history lesson here. Bill Belichick was on the Giants' coaching staff in the mid-'80s when Bill Parcells started making the off-season program sort of a voluntary, mandatory thing. Parcells would tell the players, You don't have to come to the program. But this is where the job is, and if other guys come to the program and outwork you in the offseason, the job might not be there for you when you get to training camp.

But what happens when the person not there is the leader of the team and has his job guaranteed? What happens when this same guy accuses other players on the team of not buying into the team concept?

No matter what he says publicly, Belichick isn't going to like his most important player missing half the offseason program or more. So I wouldn't be surprised if the reality of a family situation impinging on Brady's professional life could end up being a bit of a wedge between player and team.

Peter never said this in his original article he did. He only chooses to mention this part when another writer scoops his story and makes it look like (which is true) that Peter didn't give the full story. Peter doesn't let reality in the way of his puff pieces if he can help it.

2. I think, and I'm not the only one who does, that the Patriots wanted to draft Tim Tebow late in the first round or early in the second. I'll always wonder what that would have done to Brady's long-term future in New England.

Seriously? It is Tom Brady, one of the best quarterbacks of all-time. Tim Tebow hasn't done anything in the NFL yet. It's fine to draft him, but when Tebow actually outperforms Tom Brady, if that happens, then you replace Brady with Tebow. I'm sorry, I can't fathom a world where ANY 1st round quarterback from this year's draft is taken by the Patriots and Tom Brady's future any less than 2-3 years out is in jeopardy. Maybe I am naive.

Even if they had picked Tebow, the Patriots wouldn't have -- in my opinion -- pulled a Bill Walsh and switched from Joe Montana to Steve Young (not saying Tebow will reach that level) when Montana still had some football left in him.

There is no way I am underestimating Tim Tebow in this situation. You can't just replace Brady with Tim Tebow after drafting Tebow in the 1st round. You have Tom Brady, I don't care if his contract is going to expire soon, you keep Tom Brady. This isn't a Steve Young-Joe Montana situation or even an Aaron Rodgers-Brett Favre situation...at least not yet.

5. I think Marion Barberis taking all this talk aboutbeing the Cowboys' top running back pretty seriously. Barber's 10 pounds lighter than he was last fall, looks quicker in offseason work and knows he's not on scholarship anymore.

I always find it interesting that NFL teams are supposed to be impressed by a player who gets a little competition and then starts getting his shit together and getting in better shape. It's great to show some motivation, but is it really that impressive that once a player sees he starts trying his hardest when he may actually lose his job? What happens when he wins the job and the competition goes away? Or do the Cowboys just always keep the competition there to keep Barber on his toes?

9. I think baseball would be smart to do what football does in instant replay, with a twist: give each team one challenge per game -- on out/safe calls on the bases, on fair/foul calls, and homers/non-homers. That wouldn't slow a game down too much, and it would give each manager the chance to potentially change one huge call from time to time -- and it would have givenJim Leyland the chance to make Armando Galarraga's perfect game a perfect game.

This is scary, but I actually agree with a baseball thought that Peter King has. Each team should be given one challenge, that can't be used on balls and strikes, and that is it. There should be a replay booth easily available for the umpires to look at, like there is currently for home runs, that way the game isn't delayed any more than it needs to be. I am glad MLB didn't change the non-perfect game to a perfect game. MLB can't start a precedent for changing bad calls.

f. MMQB schedule reminder, for those who may have missed it last week:

June 14:Guest columnist

June 21:Guest columnist

June 28:I'll be back, catching up on everything that went down in the NFL while I was in South Africa

July 5: Guest columnist

July 12:Guest columnist

July 19:Guest columnist

July 26:I'll be back for good

What are we going to do for the next month and a half? Besides cry of course. I'll of course cover the guest columnists for MMQB if they are worth covering.

I don't want to give too much away regarding the guest columnists, but I think you'll enjoy all of them. One of my editors,Dom Bonvissuto, will be tweeting out clues to the identities of the guest columnists in the days leading up to their columns.

Here's a clue. They will be athletes or coaches in the NFL that Peter King is friends with and will be people who may not have too many things interesting to say.

And by the way, for those who sent e-mail and Tweets condemning me for condemning BP and saying I won't be buying their gas again -- many of you think the mega-spill is not the fault of the guy who pumps the gas or the local manager who runs the BP gas station, and of course it isn't. But you have to protest in some way when you see horrible injustice, and this will be my little way.

Feel the pain BP! Peter King has cut you off and will ruin you. There's no better way to show BP how angry you are than by hurting those people who franchise BP gas stations and had nothing to do with the spill. The upper management of BP will be sure to feel those reverberations from Peter's protest. They will fall off their yachts they will be so afraid of what Peter will do. Peter's way of protest will take a long time to actually affect those responsible at BP and will mostly hurt "the little guy" more in the short term.