So as former Florida quarterback Tim Tebow tries to change his throwing motion without, as Tebow puts it, changing his throwing motion, who’s helping him?
One of the keys to the process has been Dolphins quarterbacks coach David Lee.
“I’ve learned a lot from Coach Lee,’' Tebow tells Jeff Darlington of the Miami Herald. “He’s a great coach. We worked a lot on different drops, on coming out of play actions, adjustments in plays they had. It’s a wonderful experience for me.’' [Editor’s note: And a blessing.]
Darlington calls Lee’s interest in helping Tebow unusual, pointing to the fact that the Dolphins aren’t likely to draft him. (Then again, round two has unofficially become the “quarterback round” in Miami, especially when factoring in the second-round picks traded for Daunte Culpepper and A.J. Feeley.) Darlington attributes the effort to the fact that the Dolphins’ coaching staff was responsible for Tebow’s team in the Senior Bowl, explaining that the assignment “comes with a certain responsibility to actually coach the players.”
That’s a possibility, but then there’s the reality Lee’s boss and Lee’s boss’s boss are represented by Tebow’s agent, Jimmy Sexton. That’s right, Sexton handles Tebow and Dolphins coach Tony Sparano and, more importantly, Dolphins football captain Bill Parcells.
So if Sexton can preside over the reclamation of Tebow’s career as an NFL quarterback, the star of Sexton and anyone who helped the process will rise. If it doesn’t work, then the spin will be that it was destined to fail.
Thus, while the Herald headline characterizes the situation for the Dolphins as one with “nothing to gain,” the reality for Sexton, Sparano, Parcells, and Lee is that they collectively have plenty to gain -- and nothing to lose.
Meanwhile, the fact that the 56-year-old Lee has managed to help Tebow begin to change an ugly, looping throwing motion (without of course changing his throwing motion) serves only to highlight the failure of the folks in Gainesville to send Tebow to the next level with something other than a Pop Warner windup. Lee has spent six years as an NFL assistant coach; the rest of his 28 years as a coach were spent at, you guessed it, the college level. So if a 22-year college coach was able to immediately spot and begin to fix a major mechanical flaw from the moment he met Tebow, someone at the University of Florida should have done the same way back in 2006.