Audio By Carbonatix
As training camp gets into full swing and the football season looms ever closer, our beloved Denver Broncos are stuck in what’s known as a “rebuilding” year. As a team in flux, the orange and blue face many questions. Can Josh McDaniels succeed as a head coach? Will Kyle Orton be able to execute McDaniels’ offense? Will the defense improve enough to stop anybody? Why is Brandon Marshall such a punk ass?
All legitimate questions, yet they pale before the one, big question of the year: Who among the Broncos will step up and Tweet enough interesting/controversial/insane material to distract die-hard fans from what is almost sure to be a god-awful, cover-your-eyes, painful trainwreck of a season?
As Chicago Sun-Times writer Kevin Allen so shrewdly pointed out in a blog yesterday, the ubiquity of athletes on Twitter, and the ridiculous feuds athletes brew up on the popular social-networking service, will be one of the most entertaining storylines/diversions of the 2009 NFL season — and that goes double for fans of woeful franchises such as Cincinnati and, uh, Denver. But while Cincinnati has a trash-talking, feud-starting, fine-incurring monster of an entertainer Tweeting for them, who do we have?
Not too long ago, Westword web editor Joe Tone blogged about all the Broncos on Twitter. Unfortunately for fans, the most entertaining of all these Twits is the obviously fake, although still intermittently hilarious in a crass way: @KingNeckbeard, an account that pokes fun at party boy QB Kyle Orton. The rest of our crew are either too polite (Come on Royal, talk some shit!), too inactive (apparently Knowshon Moreno is also holding out of his Twitter account hoping for a better contract there, too) or just too damn boring to take the mantle of Twitter leadership this team so desperately needs.
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Still, it’s early, and hope remains that one of our existing Twits can turn it around or latecomers can sign up. Elvis Dumervil could live up to his entertaining namesake. New DE Robert Ayers could turn out to be a killer pass rusher and a funny guy. Peyton Hillis could show his versatility in yet another way. Or Brandon Marshall could prove he’s useful by turning his bitching and moaning into the kind of half-witted hilarity we’ve come to expect from his diva counterpart, Ochocinco. We’ll just have to wait and see.
One thing’s for sure: Barring the kind of miracle that sports movies are written around, it’s going to be a long, patience-testing season. In that kind of year, a little help in the form of some Tweeted distraction could go a long way. How about it, Neckbeard? You up to it?
