Welcome to the second installment of Football Mysteries
Slender Man. A disturbing urban legend about a really tall skinny pale guy with no face and a pretty dapper suit who terrorizes children in the woods. Some say he’s just a stupid fictional boogeyman dreamed up in an internet comedy forum, but when you have people willing to murder for your internet meme, maybe the truth is that Slender Man was real all along. But how could such a disturbing creature go unnoticed until recently? Well, the answer might be by hiding in plain sight. As a football player.
This football player.
At first glance it seems almost obvious. Tall, impossibly thin, a face so incredibly white that it literally blinds you from it’s features. Sound familiar?
But anyone can dismiss physical comparisons relatively easily. Lots of people look like other things. Mike Tomlin from House looks like Omar Epps, the coach of the Steelers. Andy Reid looks like a walrus. Johnny Manziel looks like an asshole. So we can’t automatically assume Glennon is Slender Man based on (admittedly very compelling) physical evidence. We need to look deeper.
Slender Man became a phenomenon during the year 2009. He was first seen as a sort of background disturbance in photos of children playing. You don’t notice him at first, but you feel something is “off”, deep in your bones. Then you notice him. The guy in the background… he’s too tall, too thin… where is his face, was it blocked out due to poor exposure? Watching Mike Glennon on the sidelines generates the same feeling. Something feels off, but we accept the sense of wrongness because we are watching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and it usually feels that way when they are playing.
But when you start to look at the parallels in Glennon’s history compared to Slender Man, the evidence begins to present itself like a creepy flasher under the overpass.
2008 – Mike Glennon redshirts for NC State.
June 2009 – The first evidence of Slender Man appears online, with several images of him stalking children. The images go viral. Slender Man is now a bona fide meme, an internet urban legend.
2009 – The YouTube project Marble Hornets, a series about interactions and hunting Slender Man appears online. Hornets also happen to be the name of the Charlotte NBA team, and Charlotte is a city in the state of North Carolina. North Carolina State. NC State.
2009-2010 – Glennon backs up Russell Wilson at NC State, standing quietly on the sidelines watching a QB who is about the size of a small child.
2011 – Notch, the creator of Minecraft, puts enemies in the game called Endermen. Slender Man begins to receive more widespread notability. In the same year, Glennon is given the starting job at NC State after Russell Wilson transfers to Wisconsin for reasons he refuses to discuss at length.
2012 – Things are mostly quiet. Glennon continues to play for NC State, Slender Man sightings continue.
Feb 2013 – Glennon is finally noticed as he participates in the scouting combine.
March 2013 – Video game “Slender: The Arrival” is released.
April 2013 – Glennon is drafted by Tampa Bay.
2013 NFL Season – Josh Freeman, the once promising young kid in Tampa, appears to now be a broken shell of a man. Schiano dumps him and Freeman goes on to never be the same. Greg Schiano receives most of the blame for everything but the exact circumstances remain unclear.
May 2014 – Two young girls are convicted of stabbing someone in an attempt to appease Slender Man in Wisconsin, the same state that Russell Wilson transferred to.
2014 NFL season – Lovie Smith chooses Josh McCown as his starting QB despite Glennon being the better option. Lovie seems reluctant to even look at Glennon. However, early in the season, Lovie finally gathers all eight pages of the Bucs playbook and McCown is injured. Glennon goes into the game against the Steelers and terrorizes the childish fans who try in vain to stop him with yellow towels. McCown comes back later and Glennon is immediately benched despite the terrible record.
Glennon’s career trajectory is almost beat for beat the same rate as Slender Man’s. Some speculation in hushed tones has begun to creep up as people have noticed the similarities, but most are still unwilling to acknowledge the possibility of a demon that walks among us. Two things are certain: he looks the part, and QBs in front of him seems to transfer or become broken at an alarming regularity.
The timeline ads up well enough, but the crux of the theory works better when the pictures are taken into account. Several sightings of Slender Man have been spotted in Tampa Bay Buccaneers training camps and practices.
But if Glennon is truly Slender Man, a video released last week has potentially blown his cover wide open. Instagram user @Shampayn3 uploaded a very disturbing video of what appears to be another instance of Slender Man terrorizing a small child.
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The video is a classic Slender Man sighting. A young child appears to be having a good time but something seems off. You hear strange, almost alien noises coming from offscreen. Eventually the camera pans past the terrified owner of the phone and we get a brief glimpse of an impossibly tall, pale creature attempting to mimic the girl. The video quickly cuts off here. It’s brief and hard to see, but some frame by frame analysis shows the impossibly tall pale man.
His face is very hard to make out. Slender Man usually doesn’t have a mouth, but in some interpretations he does have one or two facial features, and this video certainly doesn’t have a human performing those moves. The woman and girl haven’t been seen since the video was posted, but some suspicious parties have presented the video to Glennon.
@BobbyRainey I didn’t think it would actually leak! I think I can hear your laugh from all the way up in Georgia
— Mike G (@Mike_Glennon) February 20, 2015
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Glennon appears to be almost joking here, and it remains murky if this is indeed acknowledgement that Glennon is Slender Man. Some Slender Man/Glennon believers think that Glennon may be a tragic monster. Most Slender Man news seems to arrive in the months outside the Football season, as if Slender Man is busy during these times. Glennon has a Masters in Arts in Liberal Studies, which almost certainly results in a lot of free time during the offseason. It’s theorized that SlenderGlen may be a sort of vampire sort of creature, who can function and blend into normal society but cannot control his urge to consume forever. This would explain the discrepancies in sightings during the offseason vs the season.
The last evidence we have are the weird stories teammates tell.
Glennon’s head coach at NC State, Tom O’Brien, likes to describe Glennon as a quiet kind of guy who would stay in the back of the crowd. It was okay, since Glennon was easily the tallest person in the room so he could still see. But O’Brien remembers that Glennon would always have a nice 3 piece suit in his locker, even though he never saw Glennon wear it. “It was strange” Said O’Brien, “For a guy as awkward looking as he was, I’d think he’d want to dress up to impress people, but he never wore the suit. Guys would tease him about it but he never responded to the jokes “
His teammate in Tampa Bay during 2013, Darrelle Revis, said he got to know Glennon while practicing against him, but something always made him uneasy. “He always seemed to be covering something up. He’d wear gloves always and never got undressed around everyone else. He said it was because he had a few scars and was embarrassed about his whiteness, but that didn’t seem to be true. He’d dress and pack up after everyone had usually left and none of us ever saw him shower.”
Revis then recalled a particular incident near the end of the 2013 season.
“It was after the Bills game in Tampa. We’d won, the place was beginning to empty. I had tweaked my ankle and had gone into the locker room before the game ended, and was there still working it out as most of the team had left. I was over in the ice tubs alone when I see a dark shape dash around in the locker room. Then I hear strange breathing sounds coming from the corner behind the doctor’s examining table. I look, see something there, huge, but very hard to make out. I got out of the tub and was going for a closer look when a reporter came in and took my attention. Next thing I know Mike is standing next to me, as if from nowhere, all dressed up. He answered the questions and left before I had a chance to figure out how he got into the room to begin with.”
Revis’s story is similar to many other players, most describe a dark shape out of the corner of their eye and Glennon appearing soon afterwards seemingly from nowhere. No player has ever been to his house, which Glennon says “it’s in the middle of the woods, I like my privacy so I don’t invite a lot of people over”.
There isn’t any proof of Glennon being Slender Man. All the evidence presented here is circumstantial at best, but as the rumors persist and sightings continue, it’s clear that Glennon needs to be watched. Tampa Bay will likely draft a QB in two months, which would put Glennon on the sidelines again. Maybe this time we can put a camera on him and put the theory to the test.
What do you think? Is Mike Glennon Slender Man? Have you experienced any strange phenomena regarding Mike Glennon?