In such a cynical, sarcastic society, oftentimes looking for the negative on anybody or anything, if you're fortunate enough to spend five minutes or 20 minutes around Tim Tebow, your life is better for it.

-Thom Brennaman

"DECISION TIME! DO YOU GO FOR IT?"

"Go. Go. Go. Go. Go"

-Brennaman and Charles Rogers. On third and goal.

Ideally, football games are not opportunities to reflect on just why everyone under 35 has a protective shell of cynicism and sarcasm between the world and everyone's inner Beaver.* But this one was the BCS championship game on FOX, so it was either that or picture Thom Brennaman massaging lotion into Tebow's feet.

Anyway, the reason most of my generation raised outside the state of Utah and I are looking for the negative so often is people like Thom Brennaman, corporate robots who relentlessly praise anyone and anything they're directed to.

The annoying shilling doesn't stop at the commercial break's edge these days; in fact, that guy with the Boomhauer accent saying "that thur is purty dern cool" during one of the six hundred commercials for a pickup truck was probably the most genuine moment of the night. That guy actually believed tool boxes in the side of your pickup truck were purty dern cool, and he communicated that without sanctimony or idiocy. At no point did he turn to the camera and say that if you didn't think tool boxes on your pickup truck were purty dern cool then you are destined for the lake of fire.

If only we could say the same for FOX. I could write a bunch of stuff about what an embarrassment that whole thing was, but other people have taken care of this for me. Fanhouse:

Brennaman was so far over the top in his pro-Tebow hyperbole on Thursday that the game became darn-near unwatchable unless the volume was off.

Orson:

Assumptions one should not make about this game: … 3) Fox puts on an incompetent broadcast. No. Incompetent doesn't cover how inept their clodfooted work on the BCS has been.

Awful Announcing, which must live for moments like this:

This is so bad, I really don't even have words to describe it.

Deadspin:

According to Fox announcer Thom Brennaman—and if you don't agree with him, you must be some kind of deranged lunatic—Tim Tebow just may be the finest human being to ever live on this planet or any other.

Etc, etc, etc. The presentation was such a disaster that a lot of people have been complaining about how bad the game was when, really, it wasn't too bad. Julio Iglesias was nearly decapitated, and there was a critical fourth-down stand and a couple of miraculous interceptions and all in all it was a tense, well-played football game but for the context.

At some point, being directed to interpret everything as history in the making has a downside. Now we expect the Greatest Game Ever Played between the Greatest Players Ever Assembled every time out. And when that's not happening—which it wasn't—no one backs off. They just lie to your face.

So, yeah, I'm tired of all hype. I'm tired of having the "national championship" game between two teams virtually indistinguishable from a half dozen others on a random Thursday night in January on a network that never shows college football. I'm tired of how stupid it all is.

And I think I'm detecting a seismic shift in opinion out there. Bowl defenders outside of newspaper columnists who love them some junket are few and far between—and frankly, I'd rather have Stewart Mandel on the other side of any argument I'm having, thanks very much. Every year some coach and some president gets screwed and converts to the church of playoff. Last year, weirdly, it was Georgia. This year, obviously, it's USC and Utah and Texas. At some point things have to change, because last night felt more like a farce than a championship.

*(60s television version, not unwise quarterback version.)