It’s funny (maybe only to me) that even in failure, Tim Tebow needs to be exceptional. That there has to be something unusual about him that uniquely differentiates him from other great college athletes who became failed or marginal NFL players.
As previously mentioned: Troy Smith. Not as inaccurate as Tebow but pretty bad for a Heisman winner (he was 65% in college). Ditto Chris Weinke. Danny Wuerffel had a single decent season but also didn’t work out.
Not a Heisman winner but look at Shane Lechler. He was a monster in high school, playing QB and kicking and just overwhelming all the local talent in the boonies out west of Houston. At A&M? Wasn’t even a reasonable 3rd string QB and switched to punting full time. He’s a good NFL punter (maybe one of the best ever) but he’s nowhere close to being an NFL level QB. At each level, the quality of the competition changes and you can’t take advantage of the vast differences in individual quality that almost always exists at some position on a college or high school team.
I’m sure Newton WAS frustrated, but even he would have admitted at the time that Tebow was doing a great job as a college quarterback, and Newton probably wouldn’t have won any more games than Tebow did.
YES, Tebow is a terrible NFL quarterback, but it doesn’t follow that he didn’t deserve all the awards and accolades he received in college.
I mean, Tom Brady is the best quarterback in the NFL, one of the best NFL quarterbacks ever, and a sure first ballot Pro Football Hall of Famer. Tim Tebow is none of those things. But Tebow DESERVED to win the Heisman Trophy, and Brady didn’t.
Great comparison. But here’s the thing I don’t get. Let’s just say Ricky Henderson was in the same “lower level” baseball league as you. He would have exploited those young pitchers/catchers even more, right? So, the guys who are better QB’s now and are in the NFL–how come they couldn’t dominate the college football “weaknesses” even more than the obviously less talented Tebow did? Like the OP, I’m baffled by this. If they’re better football players, they should have been more dominant then. I know there are other issues, like development, coaching, systems, etc… But I think this Tebow thing is quite a phenomenon.
Well, a big factor is that whole offensive schemes and systems that would never work in the NFL work extremely well in college.
Many college teams have won championships with an option attack, or with quarterbacks who run first and throw second. A college football coach’s job is to win games, NOT to groom quarterbacks for the NFL. So, even if a coach has a quarterback on his roster who’s a great pro prospect, he may still find it more prudent to make a runner with a lesser throwing arm his quarterback.
That approach wouldn’t work in the NFL because defenses are filled with guys who are extremely strong and extremely fast. Even if Tim Tebow had a great arm (he doesn’t), he couldn’t run the same kind of offense in the NFL that he did with the Florida Gators, because NO quarterback could take the pounding he’d get in the NFL.
Also, individual ability is highlighted in baseball to a greater degree than football.
Tim Tebow playing for Florida Atlantic over Florida wouldn’t have been a Heisman winner nor a first round draft pick.
Ricky Henderson playing for Florida Atlantic over Florida wouldn’t have been drafted as well but would still have stood out to scout teams.
The Tim Tebow thing is really a confluence of several factors. One is big SEC school with its national exposure and rabid fanbase. Another is big time coach (Urban Meyer has had success EVERYWHERE). But those are pretty common.
The thing that really pushed it over the top was Tebow’s squeaky clean image combined with evangelical Christians making him their poster boy. Deeply religious college QB Christians aren’t unusual (see Colin Kaepernick or RGIII, for example). But few are going to match the image evangelicals want for a national figure. Kaepernick has too many tattoos. And RGIII, quite frankly, is too black for evangelicals to embrace. Actually, Kaepernick might also be too black for evangelicals. Tim Tebow is from a middle class family. He’s white. He doesn’t get into trouble. And he wears his religion on his sleeve.
Look at the major college QBs and their rabid fanbases. RGIII, Cam Newton, and Vince Young all have irrational fanbases and are from successful, national-championship caliber college programs. For reasons of homerism, Vince Young still has such fans in Houston. But their appeal didn’t extend past college football fans because they weren’t propped up as ideal examples of a religious movement as well.
I would still turn the question on its head: how did a quarterback who looks so awful throwing the ball ever win the Heisman? I’m no quarterback coach, but he makes me think he’s the dad in this ad.
So I just looked at Tebow’s PASSING stats @ UF. Completion % of 66 with a yards per attempt of 9.1. Tom Brady @ Michican: 61.5% and 7.5 Yards per attempt. Peyton Manning 62.5% and 8.1 YPA. My bafflement at how bad of a pro QB Tebow is continues!
He seems to have actually gotten *worse *over the last couple of years. Maybe he’s pressing, maybe he’s listening to too many people about what he’s doing wrong, maybe the NFL game is just too fast for him (it happens), who knows. Whatever.
For most positions, performance in college is a good basis to project performance in the NFL. But for quarterbacks, the game is almost entirely different. Very few QB’s are stars at both levels.
I don’t know if it’s so much schemes and systems, as the flip side of that- quarterbacks who run a lot in college can put a lot of stress on the defenses as to whether they stay put to protect against the QB running the ball, or whether they hang back to protect against the pass. It’s almost like a run/throw option game when you have the right QB like a Tebow or a Manziel- the defense loses a lot against them.
Pro teams run schemes that don’t let the quarterback run, or generally forbid/discourage the quarterbacks from running, lest they get injured.
This is fine for pocket passers a-la Peyton Manning or run/throw QBs whose passing game is really strong.
But put a guy like Tebow whose strength was really his running ability in that situation, and his throwing game is found sorely wanting.
That’s why there’s so much controversy about Johnny Manziel going pro; nobody’s sure yet whether he’ll be worth a damn, because they haven’t seen enough of his game to tell if he’ll be a good pro-style QB or not.
There is one missing aspect here- not everyone can play quarterback all of the time! What I mean is, good coaches and systems will earlier in development identify what you should be playing later in your career and you’ll play that position regardless of how it affects the earlier teams.
As an example, I went to a single middle school and single high school town in which the high school head coach had been around for 40 years and had even coached most of the parent coaches in the 3-6 grade leagues. In 7th grade, I was assigned TE/DE/MLB. I’d QBed in 3-6th grade and even QBed in 7 & 8th grade intramural scrimmages, but when we played a true game I played my position(s). This continued for Freshman and Sophomore years where our team went 0-15 and was probably outscored ~400 to 100 in total points. Junior year on varsity, we went 8-3 and Senior year we went 13-0 and won the state large school championship. We didn’t have the full complement of players and positions as a single class but integration of classes and mastering our positions led to a well oiled machine.
I played Josh Heupel (Heisman runner up in 2000) in high school in my senior year. I had 3 sacks and 2 forced fumbles and we beat him 63?-0. He was very good if his receivers had time to get open so our strategy was rushing 6 or 7 every single play.
So the assumption that Ricky Henderson should have dominated even more, negates good coaching and working on other skills that made Ricky the MLBer that he became. Additionally, you need a team to support a good player- if Ricky is the only good player, don’t pitch to him (or use a team’s one-dimensionality against them/him).
The short answer is he scored 55 touchdowns rushing & passing, threw for 3300 yards with only 6 picks. He averaged about 4 1/4 touchdowns per game over the entire season. By any measure he had a damn good season.
Take this for whatever it’s worth but some of the guys who do the sort of statistical evaluation for football that sabermetricians do for baseball have written articles saying that while Tebow absolutely does not do well at the sort of things traditional quarterbacks do well, the things he does do well may actually be more predictive of winning games. Of course football is harder to evaluate and statistical analysis of football is still in its infancy compared to baseball so there are plenty of other statisticians who say these guys are completely wrong.
It assumes “all other things being equal”. That’s certainly not true.
Football, more than baseball or basketball or a number of other sports, is really a team sport. And the quality of players and coaching is vastly different in the NFL. Even the worst NFL players are better than all but a few of the top college players at their positions.
It’s a common tale that good college QBs don’t go anywhere in the NFL. The actual difference here is that Tebow is famous enough we notice when he fails. The rest just fade into relative obscurity. Even before he was drafted, analysts said he’d have a difficult transition, especially noting his poor throwing motion. If anything is surprising, it’s how surprised people are that his known flaws actually ended up being flaws.
It was actually more surprising to me that Tebow was drafted in round 1 than it was that Tebow wasn’t a good passer.’
'His flaws were well known to scouts, who generally pegged him as a 3rd or 4th rounder, for a team that was willing to make him a project or that wanted to try him at another position.
Yup, it was Josh McDaniels who was the head coach for the Broncos who drafted Tebow, well ahead of every projection out there. No one really knows why he did it, other than the fact that McDaniels was simply a horrible head coach who had no business at the helm.
Yes, I get that – but what boggles my mind is that he could complete all those passes with the way he throws the ball! To me, it is like if Charles Barkley went out and shot the course record at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am. I would fully acknowledge that he deserves the record, but I would still think – how the hell did that happen?
If you remember his college days, a lot of his passes were to wide open receivers or very short yardage situations at the goal line.
Even in Denver, he made some nice completions. But again, he rarely passed unless his receivers were wide open.
Florida’s offense was all about speed. Spread the field with lots of speedy receivers. Get lots of separation. Deficiencies in accuracy can be overcome by talented catching (Riley Cooper and Aaron Hernandez, no matter their personal faults, are pretty good at catching footballs). The problem is defenders in the NFL are also fast and QBs have to fit balls into tighter windows.
So, it’s like Charles Barkley shooting a course where all the holes have 30 yards shaved off, the fairways are 30 yards wider, and the cup is 1 foot in diameter.