Steelers safety Troy Polamalu isn’t taking anything away from Tim Tebow or the Denver team that beat Pittsburgh in the playoffs, but five months later he’s still baffled that the offense the Broncos were running with Tebow at the helm was able to beat the Steelers.
Polamalu told Jason Cole of Yahoo Sports that he’s accustomed to playing against complex offenses in the NFL, and he never believed an offense as simplistic as the one Tebow ran in Denver could be as successful as that offense was in that game.
“It was an incredibly simple offense that you just don’t think can work in this league, but it worked for them with the kind of talent they had,” Polamalu said.
Polamalu said the Broncos’ offense became so predictable that it was actually unpredictable: The Steelers would be sure the Broncos weren’t going to run the same play over and over again because NFL offenses just don’t do that, and yet the Broncos did it.
“There’s no way they’re going to run that same route again,” Polamalu says he was thinking during the game. “As a safety, part of your job is to eliminate certain routes that you don’t think they’re going to run. I would line up and say, ‘They ran that the last time, there’s no way they’re going to run it again.’ Then they did. The next time, ‘There’s no way they’re going to run that again,’ then they did.”
Whether Tebow can eventually become a quarterback capable of playing well enough to win consistently in an NFL offense remains to be seen -- and the Broncos’ decision to trade him suggests that they have their doubts. But at times last season Tebow was very effective, doing things that you wouldn’t think could work in the NFL.