With the incoming crop of rookies gathering this week in Indianapolis for the Scouting Combine a/k/a Underwear Olympics (we’re doing our best to get that term to catch on), one of the big-name guys who won’t be throwing any footballs at Lucas Oil Stadium is doing his best to upstage the competition by commandeering the pre-Combine news cycle.
On Monday, Adam Schefter unleashed the first wave of ESPN’s Tebowrama, with a report that the guy who spent four years at Florida throwing the ball like a rickety catapult was in the process of changing up his throwing motion.
Act 2? Video of Tebow throwing the ball like a real quarterback, and audio of Tebow talking about it. (Now playing on SportsCenter, and in the video box that pops up right here.)
“Well the number one thing is to just reach my potential,” Tebow told ESPN’s NFL Live. “You know, I believe in myself as a player and an athlete. And I wanna be the best player that I can be, to help an NFL team and help an organization. So my number one goal is to reach my potential and be the best I can be. [Editor’s note: Apparently, he had “reach my potential” written on his hand.] And that’s why these changes occurred, is because I felt it’s gonna help me be more accurate, be quicker, and just make better decisions. And for me making this change has been very natural, [and] I’m excited about it. . . .
“I’m still the same player. I still have the same heart, the same soul, the same knowledge of football. But I’m just tweaking a few of my fundamentals. Things I need to get better at anyways. So I’m changing where I hold the ball, I’m changing how I get to my release point. And those changes have come very natural to me. The coaches I’ve been working with have made it very easy, very understandable for me. And now it’s just repping and repping and repping. And I feel with my work ethic I can make that repetition just become natural for me where it’s second nature and I go out there and do it every time, and I feel very comfortable with that.”
Tim, Nick Saban would like to thank you for further assisting his future recruiting efforts against Urban Meyer and Florida. (Actually, Saban and Tebow are represented by the same guy, and we’d be shocked to learn that Saban didn’t have at least an indirect hand in the current Tebow reclamation project.)
We can see it now -- Saban shows up at the house, Sandra Bullock remarks on how handsome he is, and then Nick breaks out the DVD and the Little Debbie’s, playing Tebow’s remarks while sharing an oatmeal cream pie with the five-star high school quarterback.
“Did you hear Tebow talk about changing where he holds the ball and changing how he gets to his release point?” Saban will then say. “Now, when you come to Alabama, you won’t have to hire your own coaches four years later to teach you the right way to throw a football. We’ll start teaching you the right way to throw a football from the first day you show up on campus.”
We don’t fault Tebow for essentially confirming that Meyer and his staff indeed have “no clue” how to develop a quarterback. But by making the changes look so easy, the obvious question Tebow raises is why in the hell didn’t Urban Meyer consider having Tebow make them at some point before his eligibility expired?
The only other explanation is that Meyer simply didn’t care about helping Tebow improve his ability to get paid to play football. And for any five-star high school quarterback who is already hearing all the locals talk about how he’ll be the next Joe Montana, that’s a flag even redder than the one Saban has flying from a plastic pole in the driver’s-side window of his Mercedes SUV.