Redefining the So-Called "Tim Tebow" John 3:16 Story

3 of 6 From Matt Prater to Demaryius Thomas and John 20: 24-29, here are some of the things that America completely missed.

Apr 19, 2025

The previous essay in this series can be found here.

Click here to check out our Landing Page where all of the essays are listed.

CATCHING UP

We are discussing a very famous NFL game that was played on January 8, 2012 when the Denver Broncos hosted the Pittsburgh Steelers.

To catch up with a few key details: This game’s ending was linked to nine 316s, directly and indirectly, which caused tens of millions of people to recall Event A, Tim Tebow’s fabled John 3:16 game.

We have learned, through the universal language of math and the most elementary science, that this cluster can be expected to appear far, far less than one in 8 trillion NFL games, where chance is presumed to govern all such outcomes. This, versus the scientific method’s requirement of at least a 1 in 20 match rate.

At today’s going rate of 285 games per NFL season, what happened in Denver, Colorado, on January 8, 2012— in a game that started at a contextually relevant 3 p.m.— is the kind of outcome we can expect to see far, far less than one game every 28 billion NFL seasons. Again, this is where chance is assumed to determine all of our data points’ outcomes.

Until others can show otherwise, the only rational conclusion is to assume that this is a very public case where one can easily destroy chance’s credibility, through that all-important scientific method.

At a certain point, you have to move on from lousy explanations. We’ll leave off with the number crunching here.

INSTANT REPLAY 1

Before diving into other aspects of this storyline, I encourage the reader to focus on Event B in the diagram below. I have marked the game’s ending with the red vertical line on the right side. The yellow line corresponds to the Denver-Pittsburgh game’s start.

Two more things.

For where we’re going, it may be worth taking one last look at the Denver-Pittsburgh game’s ending. As indicated by the large red arrow, this impossibly rare and relevant conclusion caused tens of millions of people to think of Event A and a national championship game that centrally involved John 3:16. Click on the image above to see this final play, especially if you haven’t seen it before. It will only take the first fifteen seconds.

Finally, let’s refer back to the diagram aboven one last time, to note those two yellow dots. How interesting that a game with such a miraculous ending would start with two teams lining up in what we’re calling Triple 3-16 formations. This may be unprecedented in NFL history, owing to the fact that 16-point margins are quite rare. Unprecedented or very rare, this pairing certainly adds to how purposeful the 316 patterns look going the other way, where Event A is seen to foreshadow Event B.

INSTANT REPLAY 2

And here, I return to that point I made earlier about hindsight being “20/20.” Here’s a second piece of video that absolutely must be considered. The first 20 seconds will suffice.

What I have to share next will shock many of you.

You might want to sit down. If you’re standing on a subway train, consider holding on to a bar or one of those straps. Please, put down your drink.

Behold, how the miraculous Denver-Pittsburgh John 3:16 began:

A question to football’s analytics community: How often, in the history of the NFL or even college football, has a kicker booted a ball all the way down the field so that it hits the other team’s uprights, bounces onto the playing field, and then settles on the 20-yard line?

This detail is significant to football fans by default. In such situations, the 20-yard line is where the next play is set. That’s why the announcer was hoping it would land there—because the 20-yard line is relevant to football fans in this general context.

It was also relevant in another way: to this particular game’s conclusion. Matt Prater’s opening-play kickoff ended on the same yardline where the final play of the same game began—the iconic 80-yard touchdown pass to Tim Tebow. When one thinks in terms of foreshadowing, Prater’s kick seems to foreshadow the miraculous ending.

This opening play may be as improbable as the same game’s ending. In that context, it forces us to consider how the opening ended and began. How often does a kicker bounce a football off the uprights so that it lands on the 20-yard line, in an opening game play where the two teams’ previous 3 games were decided by an average of 16 points?

This kind of macro sync is relatively unique for being so focused on religious data, particularly Christian data. The strong associations with Jesus Christ through John 3:16, combined with the improbabilities at a Planck level, legitimize the possibility that we’re looking at an Act of God here—though others who see this pattern as non-random may offer different explanations.

My thinking is that millions of Christian football fans will likely view this as an Act of God. It truly feels like something straight out of the Bible, in some ways. Yet, it hasn’t received serious attention from the public at large. I don’t say this because of the data I uncovered, or those two Triple 316s that others pointed out on Wikipedia. I say this because of how people fixated on the relational past and how the final results compelled them to think of the college John 3:16 game—our Event A.

And then for only 24 hours.

I mean this: Since when do nearly one hundred million football fans—Christians and non-believers alike—only consider the passer on folkloric passing plays??

You’ll be hard-pressed to find many references to how Demaryius Thomas fits into this story. It’s not that fans didn’t know he was the receiver in question. It’s just that almost none of them took the time to give Thomas a closer look.

Demaryius Thomas and Christmas

For those who might not know, Christmas is one of the most significant days on the Christian calendar. It’s not the most important day, to be clear—that distinction belongs to Easter Sunday, when Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead after being crucified on Good Friday. Christmas, however, is when the world celebrates the birth of Jesus—the very same Jesus of John 3:16.

Seen in this light, Tim Tebow’s receiver didn’t just catch a pass. He extended the John 3:16 narrative through the very first day of his life. How does one overlook such a detail in this story? The only explanation I can think of is that not enough people took this possible Act of God seriously. They likely didn’t because we are conditioned by academia and mainstream thinkers to avoid discussions about synchronicity or the so-called perception of meaningful patterns. It’s all woo, you know. Take if from the experts.

Logical consistency means that Thomas demands inclusion through his birth, which is plainly relevant to the Jesus of John 3:16 theme. And there’s more:

Demaryius Thomas was a devout Christian, just like Tebow. A perfect passer-receiver combination—if you think about it—on a play that inspired 90 million people to look up a Bible verse. For the second time.

Continuing, we said that the wider narrative began with Tebow playing with a broken leg while scoring a 29-yard touchdown. The same arc ends in a game that concludes with Denver finishing with 29 points. Demaryius Thomas completed what Tim Tebow started, while being chased down by Pittsburgh’s number 29.

We saw how the 2003 Broken Leg game—the apparent birth of the Tebow ‘legend’—lined up with Event A, the Florida-Oklahoma John 3:16 game, by exactly 316 x 6 days. The first factor extended the 316 cluster at the very beginning of this story. Now, we see how the second factor correlates with the story’s ending—Event B, a 6-point touchdown.

Clicking on the image above will take you to where Demaryius Thomas scores those 6 points and runs beyond the end zone, toward a tunnel. Watching that again recently reminded me of when Tim Tebow first came up with the idea of wearing John 3:16 on his face: while he was in another tunnel, just before the 2008 SEC Championship game—33 days before Event A, the Florida-Oklahoma National Championship game.

The thing is, nearly ten years after the Denver-Pittsburgh game, Demaryius Thomas died suddenly. The date was December 9, 2021. He was just 33 years old, passing away 16 days before his next birthday.

At this point, some readers may be tuned into how that 33 and 16 fit in the context of our story. We don’t count it in our null hypothesis test because 3316 is not a 316, strictly speaking, and we want to keep our central testable data as tight as possible.

Nonetheless, it is a data point that should be mentioned in this narrative, and for two reasons. This four-digit string nests 33 as well as 316—3316 and 3316—and we’ve seen both data points in significant fashion earlier.

That being the case, it would be logically inconsistent to not mention the fact that the college John 3:16 game aligns with the beginning of Tebow’s time as Denver’s starting quarterback. That is, the duration from the Florida-Oklahoma John 3:16 game to the Miracle in Miami game (on October 23, 2011) is an inclusive 33 months and 16 days. Matt Prater ended that game in overtime, in an 18-15 contest that had a total of 33 points.

D. Thomas and John 3:16 Closure

The timing of Thomas’ transition brings a true sense of closure to the John 3:16 theme in a way that Christmas cannot. John 3:16 speaks to the purpose of Jesus’s life mission, and of God giving up His only begotten Son. By dying when he was 33 years old, Demaryius's final day reflects John 3:16 and the fact that 33—the time of the original Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and, most importantly, Easter Sunday.

Through the timing of his transition, Demaryius Thomas literally nailed the high point of the Christian calendar.

All things considered, it may seem somewhat of a misnomer to think of this as just the Tim Tebow story. Huh?

Isn’t it nice how macro syncs can change the terms of the debate around synchronicity? None of the usual dismissive explanations work. Chance is crap. So are the theories that rely on chance being plausible. There’s no swamp gas here. No possibly doctored videos to worry about. The facts are on the record.

And let’s face another fact, speaking of skepticism. In a story like this, Tim Tebow’s receiver certainly recalls the story of Doubting Thomas. I looked it up and was quite surprised to learn that it only appears once in the Bible.

Here’s the passage, from John 20: 24-29:

Jesus Appears to Thomas

24 Now Thomas (also known as Didymus[a]), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

26 A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

29 Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

As we were saying: There is one place to look in the Bible where the Thomas story is mentioned—and one place only: John 20: 24-29.

TWO 20: 24-29s

Some more 20/20 hindsight.

The Tebow-to-Thomas play began on Denver’s 20-yard line and earned the Broncos their 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, and 29th points.

Another 20: 24-29.

* * *

Super Bowl 59

I’ll end this post by mentioning something that caught my eye a couple of months ago, while I was watching Super Bowl 59.

In the second quarter, Kansas City faced a 3rd and 16 play. That immediately grabbed my attention, as I was working on this project at the time.

The Chiefs attempted a pass, but Philadelphia’s Cooper DeJean intercepted the ball and ran it back 38 yards to score a touchdown.

DeJean, whose last name means "of John," wore number 33.

That immediately reminded me of 33’s relationship to John 3:16 and the fact that Demaryius Thomas had passed away at the age of 33.

I couldn’t help but wonder if DeJean’s interception was meant to recall Thomas’s death, which closed out John 3:16 perfectly by correlating with the theological high point of Christianity. It has been my experience that the best synchronicities—both micro and macro—often have an organic quality. They can sometimes extend into the future based on the same logic that made the previous data meaningful, and often with meaningful twists.

This time, my hunch turned out to be spot on. It isn’t always.

The interception by DeJean, another Christian, came exactly 38 months after Demaryius Thomas’s transition.

We’re in different improbability territory here, by the way. Exact monthly durations are about 30 times rarer than regular monthly durations. This kind of alignment comes along one time every 1,158 days, not every 30 days.

There was more. On that 80-yard touchdown play that ended the Denver-Pittsburgh game, Event B: Thomas had caught Tebow's pass on the 38-yard line.

A trifecta based on 38. Imagine two players running in opposite directions from the same yard line. Both for touchdowns.

Super Bowl 59 was played on the 40th day of the year, a Biblical number. Interesting, since DeJean was the 40th player drafted the previous year. He was celebrating his 22nd birthday. More technical significance here, as DeJean became the first NFL player to score a touchdown in a Super Bowl on his birthday.

Given my earlier thoughts, and to what I had noted about opposites, I wondered if DeJean’s birth was meant to recall Thomas’s death or, as I much prefer to think of it, his transition.

Whatever the truth, two things are abundantly clear: Both of DeJean’s data points were reflected in the final score of Super Bowl 59: 40-22.

As fate would have it, Cooper DeJean was not the only player celebrating a birthday in Super Bowl 59. Philadelphia’s Saquon Barkley was also celebrating his. At this point, I pretty much had to look in the Eagle star’s direction.

Barkley earned 40 yards receiving in the game, with his longest reception coming on a 22-yard play.

On what was his 28th birthday, Barkley broke a 26-year-old record for most rushing yards in an NFL season, regular season and playoffs included.

Then, near the end of the game, on a play that began on Kansas City’s 28-yard line, Barkley set another highly significant NFL record, earning the most total yards in a single season, regular season and playoffs included.

Was I (or we) being directed to think of DeJean and Barkley in combination? This line of thinking certainly adds up when one thinks in terms of jerseys.

Barkley’s number, 26, combines with DeJean’s 33, to reflect this iteration of American football’s most significant event: Super Bowl 59.