You young folk may just know him as a creep who can’t stop telling unfunny transphobic jokes, but once upon a time, Dave Chappelle was the funniest man alive. I will go to my grave asserting that the Chappelle Show is the greatest sketch comedy show of all time, SNL be damned. Hell, I wrote a paper on Clayton Bigsby, the world’s only Black white supremacist in college. Just after the turn of the century, Chappelle captured the cultural zeitgeist as much as anyone, highlighting America’s racism, and so-called respectable society’s uncomfortable relationship with it over and over again.
One of the show’s recurring segments was When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong, a series of short stories of men giving into their egos and keeping it real, then having things go horribly wrong, as this sketch about Vernon Franklin helps illustrate.
Speaking of people talking shit at work when they absolutely should not be doing that, the Chicago Bears and Washington Commanders played the game of the NFL’s weekend yesterday. Everyone went into it talking about the two young rookie phenom quarterbacks having diametrically opposite seasons in Washington’s electric Jayden Daniels and Chicago’s struggling number one overall pick, Caleb Williams. Both played well enough to steal a win, but the story coming out of it is the end of game Hail Mary that Hail Mary god Aaron Rodgers would have approved of. With no time on the clock down three points, Jayden Daniels launched a ball seventy yards in the air, and after hitting a morass of players, it bounced into Noah Brown’s hands for the touchdown and the dramatic 18-15 Washington win.
The Bears player who tipped the ball, Tyrique Stevenson (#29), created his own Vernon Franklin-esque, When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong sketch throughout the play, filmed by a fan from the stands. You can easily tell which Chicago Bear player he is: the guy in the corner taunting the fans after Washington has already snapped the ball for their game-winning play.
Crazy video I got of #Commanders vs #bears walk off pic.twitter.com/mXFkR5wOGW
— Joe Abdo (@joe_abdo) October 27, 2024
It gets worse! Noah Brown may have been his guy to cover. Hail Mary responsibilities are always difficult to figure out and no one knows what truly is supposed to happen on NFL plays outside of NFL film rooms, but Tyrique Stevenson, keeping it real and taunting fans with his back to the ball and a 99 percent win probability in his back pocket, was (kind of) lined up across from the guy who caught it per the NFL’s tracking data! This is so bad!
WAIT WAIT WAIT LOL
Tyrique Stevenson (29) is supposed to be following Noah Brown (85) the whole way
But he never gets connected to him, in part because he was smack talking with Commanders fans the whole time? pic.twitter.com/F1sbCQ8Bds
— Benjamin Solak (@BenjaminSolak) October 28, 2024
Stevenson has owned this very obvious fuck up and publicly apologized “to Chicago and [his] teammates for lack of awareness and focus,” noting that you “can’t take anything for granted.” He is a second-year NFL player making a youthful mistake that 99 times out of 100 no one would be talking about today.
The problem is that the Bears created that one time out of 100, rushing four at Daniels, but bizarrely keeping one lineman at the line of scrimmage for a 70-yard Hail Mary that took forever to develop (the Detroit Lions rushed five in the same situation earlier this year and got home right away). This left Stevenson out on Keeping It Real Island, just before turning around to see the cavalry coming his way. The Bears collectively screwed up this potentially season-altering play from the coaching staff on-down, but Stevenson is the star of this show, proving that even in the NFL in 2024, there are moments where keeping it real can still go wrong.