Tebowmania lives on...possibly in N.Y....looking back on T-Mania.

Tebowmania took the NFL by storm, so much so that it was powerful enough to force management of a football team to yank their starting quarterback and put Tebow in.  Yet we we’re talking about quarterback roulette with him for a good portion of the season and possibly even into the playoffs.  Tebow has recently been moved from Denver to N.Y. to back up Mark Sanchez.  It was amazing to see the outcry following the Peyton Manning signing.  Once Tebow came to Denver, we started to see separation between fans of the team and fans of the player.  No one player is bigger than the organization.  Funny thing!  Go ask Peyton about this!  He could tell you how it works.  Yes, Tebow did great things in Denver.  But let’s get it straight, he’s a great football player, but not a quarterback.  He failed to pick-out defenses that were playing single coverage and stack the box against him and he couldn’t make them pay for it.  Look at the Chiefs game, sure he had a touchdown pass in that game, but to go 2-of-8 in passing is not quarterback numbers.  Don’t blame the lockout for his problems with his fundamentals, we saw him go out and look for ways to improve his skills, and they marginally did.  Yes, the lockout did stunt his grown in the classroom in breaking down film and seeing defenses, but he had two years to do so.  Elway didn’t draft him; he didn’t have to keep him.  Had Josh Mc-D still been here, Tebow may have been the starter from day 1 in 2011 and could still be here.

I partially blame the media for this, but the fans got caught up in this and helped balloon Tebowmania to unmanageable levels.  News outlets covering Tebow when he was at Florida became crazy, and it carried into the NFL draft.  Had Tebow been taken on the second or third day, it probably wouldn’t have been a big deal.  But when he’s taken in the first round with a fourth round grade by experts, people were looking at what he did at Florida and would have said “he just wins”.  He won with a gimmick college style offense that didn’t translate to the pros and won with amazing talent around him. Here’s a list of players that he had a chance to play with and let me know which one of these guys you don’t want on your offense.

-Percy Harvin

-Riley Cooper

-Louis Murphy

-Aaron Hernandez

-David Nelson

-Maurkice Pouncey

-Michael Pouncey

-Jeff Demps

-Chris Rainey

All these with the exception of the latter two are either becoming significant players or already are significant players for their respective NFL teams.  Tebow had some great talent to work with on his way to a National Championship.  Having the run he had, being a first round pick, going to an organization that had just fired Shanahan, traded their “savior” quarterback and arguably one of the best on field talents at wide receiver, attention was on the Broncos and Tebow also had attention based on his college work.  It was like the two were too big for each other.

Another thing that didn’t work in Tebows favor is his work off the field and character off the field.  But that’s not his fault by any means.  He is what the NFL needs; we do hear a lot of the bad decisions and actions that take place with players off the field.  The work Tebow does off the field is great, we don’t hear enough about it. Everyone wants to talk about how it’s not fair the way the Broncos treated such a nice guy.  Listen, there are plenty of guys in the NFL that do great things off the field, but it goes unnoticed.  For Tebow, it’s magnified do to what he also stands for, his religious beliefs.  We have had this in the past with players such as Reggie White, but it was never the same magnitude as Tebow.  The NFL didn’t know how to handle a player with the stature as Tebow; he tapped into new audiences and brought about some new faces to the game.  He stood more for what he did off the field than he did on the field.  I am not by any means negatively breaking down Tebow, but its fact of the matter.  He was just more polarizing for his work and his religious beliefs because like I mentioned, the NFL hasn’t seen anything like this at its level. 

Any team wouldn’t argue for one second about the work he does off the field with the community and his work ethic when it comes to football, but you have got to put things aside and realize that this was a business decision.  It’s amazing to see people just trash a team because they don’t like the move they made in trying to upgrade the team.  People wanted to talk intangibles that the kid has.  NO ARGUMENT THERE!  He has “it” in terms of things that just can’t be calculated by stop watches or video, etc.  But let’s also see it this as well.  How many times did Tebow catch “lightning in a bottle”?  How often can you count on Tebow to go point for point when you got Percy Harvin acting like a one man wrecking crew?  How about Marion Barber going out of bounds to give the Broncos one more shot to go into OT?  Or fumbling the ball to give the Broncos the win?  What about the defense doing their part to always keep the game low scoring because Tebow and the offense time and time again had “3 and out” drives.  

This was purely a business move.  When you have a business, you’re always faced with making tough decisions.  The decisions may not be a popular choice.  Tebow was a business model that they felt “was only going to take them so far”.  The Broncos felt as though the business model with Tebow was a good short term solution, but they were looking long term, something that will set them up beyond the next 5 years.  If the end result with the business model for the Broncos turns into a Super Bowl, who would argue that the decision wasn’t a right decision.