Tim Tebow remains out of the NFL, as he has for 11 months since the Patriots cut him at the end of last preseason. And Tebow’s coach at Florida, Urban Meyer, remains baffled that no NFL team will sign Tebow.
Meyer, now the coach at Ohio State, said at Big Ten Media Day that he can’t figure out why Tebow isn’t in a training camp.
“I still don’t get that part of it,” Meyer said. “He’s the second-most efficient passer ever to play college football. . . . He’ll be successful in whatever he does, but he’s such a good player. I just wish it would work out for him.”
Since Meyer can’t figure it out, let me explain it to him: Tebow can’t get an NFL job because the essence of playing quarterback in the NFL is throwing a football accurately, and Tebow is not an accurate passer. Tebow has a career completion rate of 47.9 percent. That is, frankly, awful. Name a terrible NFL quarterback, and you can just about guarantee that he has a better career completion percentage than Tebow. Brandon Weeden? 55.9 percent. Blaine Gabbert? 53.3 percent. JaMarcus Russell? 52.1 percent.
It’s easy to see why Meyer loves Tebow, given the success the two had together at Florida. And in a world where Weeden and Gabbert still have jobs, it’s not unfair to ask why Tebow can’t get one. Tebow did, after all, provide the Broncos with a spark in 2011, leading them to a playoff victory. But even in that 2011 season, Tebow’s inaccurate passing was a huge problem. Tebow completed just 126 of 271 passes that season, a completion rate of 46.5 percent. Tebow remains the only NFL quarterback this century to throw more than 270 passes in a season while completing less than 47 percent of them. The last time an NFL quarterback threw that many passes with a completion percentage that low, it was San Diego’s Craig Whelihan in 1998. Whelihan never played in the NFL again.
And Tebow will never play in the NFL again. He will be remembered for that crazy season in Denver in 2011, when it seemed like every week the most exciting game in the NFL was a game featuring the Broncos, a game that came down to Tebow doing something in the closing moments. But Tebow will also be remembered as a quarterback who simply did not pass the ball well enough to last in the NFL.