It sounds like he just trademarked the term Tebowing. Since word was all over social media and could have been used by anybody wanting to make some quick cash and even includes his name, that actually makes sense. And I’m guessing we would have heard about it if he started selling Tebowing merchandise. The articles say different things, but people get confused by the details of copyright and trademarks all the time and reporters are no different. I don’t know if you can copyright a gesture.
I disagree with this.
I remember talking to other dads while at my kids football game about this new quarterback at Florida that was big, athletic, good runner etc. We were all impressed right from the start and it was just because we all watched college football, there was no hype at that point.
But Danny Wuerffel didn’t stand out during college as anything that great. When I watched him play in college I wasn’t particularly impressed, he seemed average-ish.
I disagree with your disagreement. 
The question isn’t whether or not we heard about him in college. Anybody who follows college football did.
The distinction here is how much more of a nationally known figure Tim Tebow was than any other college QBs before or since.
So, off the top of your head, do you know of any other college QB who was known quite as well nationally, even to people who knew nothing of college football? Were any of them hyped as much among the general public? If anything, the hype machine went largely dead during the NFL draft. Except for some Florida homers, most football fans thought he’d probably go in the 2nd round and potentially as low as the 4th or 5th rounds (even without the benefit of hindsight, this would have been more reasonable than the 1st round).
And what caused him to be known nationally to that extent? Was it just his football skills (which were good but were they that much better than any college player who ever lived?) or did a particular group of fans latch onto him?
As noted, plenty of other college QBs, especially those who won national championships and Heismans, have been known to college fans. Tebow’s appeal to evangelicals elevated his fame beyond even this level.
Yes but you talked about them “establishing the hype machine”. It seems to me the hype machine was already in full swing prior to his final college game just like it was for Vince Young.
Towards the end of both Tebow’s and Young’s college career, their stand-out accomplishments in college had many people assuming NFL stardome, regardless of NFL scout/expert analysis.
To me that is “hype” and was well established prior to national non-football fan recognition. Tebow definitely went up a notch later, and I wouldn’t argue about phase II of his recognition, but in my opinion, phase I followed a normal path of any stand-out college player.
Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article today that relates to this thread:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-nfl-has-a-quarterback-crisis-1441819454
Simple math. There are 128 NCAA FBS teams with rosters of about 90 players each. Thats 11,520 players. Lets say 1 in 3.5 each year are draft eligible . Thats 3454.
The NFL draft has 7 rounds of 32 players, or 224 spots; that gives each player at that level a 7% chance of being drafted. Lets say 1/2 of those don’t make any NFL roster. Now, its 3-4%.
And Im leaving out talented players from the NCAA FCS, and the lower divisions.
In other words, if you are Tim Tebow and win the Heisman, even if you get drafted, theres 100 of you entering the NFL as a rookie spread out over 32 teams, regardless of whatever accolades you may have won in as described in this thread a slower, different game. Its like the old saying, even if you are one in a million in China, theres still 1200 of you. 
Also the Heisman Trophy might be one of the most overrated trophies in sports. No doubt a high amount of talent is required to win, but it usually goes to quarterbacks and running backs, and the majority of HT winners have turned into NFL busts who have probably faced off against competitors who should have won the trophy on the other side of the ball.
I said earlier that Tim Tebow was a genuinely great college player, and I stand by that. But your broader point is true- a LOT of Heisman winners don’t amount to much in the NFL.
A big part of the reason is that voters just don’t get to see much of the leading contenders each year. Even those of us who watch a lot of college football only see the leading teams play two or three times a year. Voters are no different. Hence, they tend to vote for guys who looked great in the one or two big games in which they played on national TV.
Well… this seems to be true in terms of your general odds of being drafted. (incidentally… more than 224 spots when you factor in the additional compensatory picks, theres roughly 260 draft picks. I’d also say, a much higher rate than 50% draft picks make a team.
But, my argument here isn’t with the math really. The question is, how can a highly regarded player, such as Tebow be so good in college and so bad in the NFL. Your reasoning is simply the odds of just making a team.
With a top tier player, the numbers game doesn’t really apply. Theoretically, a pick highly regarded, played well against top quality competition in college, award winning should have no problems beating the odds and succeeding in the NFL. Are you really saying that Mariota or Jameis Winston are on equal footing with a random OL drafted in the tail end of the 7th round? The simple numbers game doesn’t take into account that players taken highly are done so because they are more likely to succeed.
There was no question, when he was drafted, being a first round draft pick, Tebow would make a team. The numbers game of just being on a team never really applied to him, because his roster spot was earned when he was drafted. The numbers involved don’t answer the question of why he didn’t make a quality NFL player.
Really the question is probably better framed about busts in general. Why do highly regarded players with a track record of success fail when at the next level.
Imagine a game of football as a sort of obstacle course - there’s a figurative swimming part, a part where you figure out a puzzle, a part where you climb some shit, swing on a rope, ride a goat, whatever. There’s a number of different skills you have to have to succeed, and you’ll be better at some and worse at some. The big difference is the obstacles are other people in football.
So imagine that there are different difficulty levels or tiers of the competition, and the difficulty across the board goes up equally at each level. So, like, at level one the puzzle is like color matching, and the goat is tied up, but at level five it’s a NYT crossword and the goat is a bull. What would end up happening from level to level would be that most of the best people from level one would still be the best at level 5, because it’s the same skills and so if you’re pretty good at all of them you’re going to be fine. But you’d also have some people who dominated at level one because they were so good at swinging and climbing that they dusted the floor with everybody else in those parts, and it didn’t matter that they sucked at the goat-riding and the puzzle parts because they were pretty easy anyway, and they could coast by on their huge comparative advantages. If your job was to analyze people’s ability at easy obstacle courses, you wouldn’t care that a guy took a few extra seconds to find the blue square when he got across the other obstacles in half the time compared to anyone else.
For the players who fit that mold, though, the higher levels would start to pose a serious problem, because they’d start really struggling to even complete the parts they sucked at, right? At some level of sucking at puzzles, you’re so bad that you can’t even finish the course, and now it doesn’t matter at all how fast you got across the ropes. So for those guys, at the higher levels it would suddenly start looking like they were being lapped by the field, and people who weren’t anywhere near as good at them on the easier courses would look better than them simply by virtue of the fact that they’re good enough at all the different skills to get by without failing. You can be a B- at ropes and puzzles and goats and get a passing grade at the C+ difficulty level, and that’s better than the guy who has an A+ in everything except a D in goats.
Tebow is one of those guys. In the obstacle course that is quarterbacking, he was so thoroughly dominant in terms of speed and strength and running out of the spread that nothing else mattered at the high NCAA level. You could point to his flaws, but the test wasn’t hard enough that it mattered. But then at the NFL level, all of a sudden the demands on his arm strength and ball delivery downfield became too much, and now it doesn’t matter how good he is at the ropes, because he just can’t solve the crossword puzzle.