Don't Close the Book on Tebow Just Yet

sorry, i think the hero worship line was in direct response to all the teary goodbyes i had just seen on my TV screen, not necessarily to anything you’d written.

i really don’t disagree with you. tebow’s contributions as a freshman were definitely a difference maker, which is the reason i moved him above wuerffel on my own little list of greatest gators ever. TT is sensational.

i just think the difference between greatest ever NCAA football player and greatest ever gator rests on another championship and/or heisman. that first list is pretty monumental, from jim thorpe and jim brown all the way through matt leinart and vince young….and at this moment, with the same number of heismans and MNCs as leinart, i don’t think history will acknowledge tebow as anything close to the greatEST. which i thought was the point of year2’s post.

this ESPNinsider article from bruce feldman touches a tiny bit on the points made here; i think it does a particularly good job explaining the tebow backlash:

There is an intersection that very, very few athletes ever find themselves at. It’s the cross between being a folk hero and being a cult hero.

The folk hero is the all-time talent, the Peyton Manning, the Vince Young, the Deion Sanders; the guy so gifted you think you may never see another quite like him. The cult hero is different, a guy who in some cases is quirky but always seems to connect with a fan base for reasons beyond simply performing on the field. Owen Schmitt is one of the best examples I can think of for Mountaineer Nation. Tim Dwight at Iowa is another one. Maybe to a lesser degree your team had some walk-on special-teams ace or a DB with a knack for highlight-reel-worthy collisions.

You can see the cult hero emerge perhaps more in the college game than in a lot of other places because there tends to be less packaging involved. We get more of a grass-roots marketing vibe that spirals off these athletes.

Tim Tebow is the best example of the blend of folk hero and cult hero we have ever seen. There have been others whom you could say thrive in the same manner, but none to this degree.

Eric Berry is downright iconic at Tennessee. He’s not only going to go down as one of the best DBs to ever play college football; he is also widely regarded as a genuine, high-character, kind-hearted, downright delightful human being. He’s almost a lock to be taken higher in the NFL draft than Tebow (although that shouldn’t validate his worth in relationship to the Florida QB as a college player). Still, Berry’s team has had nowhere near the success Tebow’s has had, and he doesn’t play the same high-profile position, so the Tebow glow is 100 times brighter.

Herschel Walker, like Bo Jackson, was freakishly athletic and productive and had Bunyanesque, lyrical one-name qualities. The combination of those things carried both into cult-hero territory. Walker got an added boost because he was on great teams; Jackson because he was also a spectacular baseball talent. Archie Manning was a little like this, too, back in his day. However, they all came along at a different time than Tebow. There was no Internet. No YouTube. ESPN wasn’t talking college football as much, nor as loudly. Hence, the grassroots and not-so-grassroots marketing wasn’t in place for them.

And of course, with this comes a downside. (Isn’t there always a downside?) Tebow has become a polarizing figure. Truth be told, the undertow of the Tebow Phenomenon (and yes, it should be a capital “P”) has made him a very polarizing figure, and that is sad. People detest him the same way they resent the Black Eyed Peas or Dave Matthews. He’s popular and at times mind-numbingly prominent. Even more so because he represents something to a whole lot of people.

Cynics abound. They’re tired. To them, Tebow is nails on a chalkboard. He’s seen as a bigger, more all-encompassing version of Duke basketball or Tyler Hansbrough or Notre Dame. Tebow fatigue has been building for three years.

Rah-rah guys — and he’s an all-timer in this regard, too (another nod to the folk/cult double) — usually get under people’s skin. How many people love to see a Duke basketball player slap the floor?

In mid-September, I was at a game watching a few of the TVs in the press box in a row with NFL scouts. UF was hosting Tennessee that day. Tebow proceeded to make a play by evading a rusher to scramble and pick up a third-and-long. He got knocked out of bounds on the Gators’ sideline and then started pumping his arms and gesturing to fire up his teammates and the crowd. One of the NFL scouts said in a mocking tone, to no one in particular: “That’s right, now wave your arms and jump up and down. You know the camera’s on you, Tim.”

So is it our nature to be cynical? After all, a big part of sports’ appeal on TV is that people often tune in to root against teams as much as they root for others, and with that venom (probably too strong a word in most cases — although we’ve all probably been watched a game at one point in our lives with someone who has actually been overjoyed that a rival team’s player was injured) comes irrational thought. Years ago, I remember a vicious little circle in which some Miami and FSU fans were so happy that a Gator had gotten into legal hot water. Within a week, a Noles player got in trouble and then, just as UM fans were laughing about that, one of their players was in the news for something similar.

In Tebow’s case, how do you resent someone who is so relentlessly positive in his off-field work for charitable causes? Or the fact that the guy is in front of microphones so often and never says the wrong thing?

Tebow’s too good to be true, no? Maybe. Maybe not. He certainly seems to have done the work.

You can say there have been better college players. All that stuff is debatable, but I don’t think you could say there has ever been a college athlete who has handled the spotlight better, or been more beloved by a fan base, than Tebow. On Saturday against FSU, in Tebow’s final game in the Swamp, we saw the outpouring of that.

As expected, the game was a rout. In Tebow’s three games starting against Florida State, he accounted for 14 total touchdowns (nine passing, five rushing). He also now has 56 rushing touchdowns in his career, three behind Eric Crouch for the FBS record among quarterbacks. It is hard not to gush about the guy. In fact, it’s hard not to gush, period.

We all deal in hyperbole. Everything has to be “the best this” or “the fastest that.” Or the worst this or that. So if you aren’t a big UF fan, you probably cringe every time Tebow’s name comes up, because we all tend to go overboard. All of us.

A few weeks back I got an e-mail asking if Tim Tebow is the only college football player allowed to give fiery pep talks: “Like Colt McCoy has never rallied his team? Rolando McClain never got in someone’s face in the locker room?”

Fair enough. Soon Tebow will be gone from UF, and I’m sure a lot of folks won’t miss him, especially not the Seminoles, because that certainly wasn’t the kind of performance you’d think Mickey Andrews was hoping for in his final FSU-UF game. The Noles now have lost six games in three of the past four seasons, while the Gators move on to Atlanta.