Tebow’s Ground-Air Attack Puts Him a Cut Above

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The New York Sun

“There ain’t much to being a football player,” said W.W. “Pudge” Heffelfinger, Walter Camp’s first All-America selection (1889) in his 1952 autobiography. “If you’re a football player.”

Florida quarterback Tim Tebow is a football player. He can’t with any certainty be called the best college football player in the nation because there’s no way to measure the performance of hundreds of outstanding offensive linemen and defensive players, and if there was, no way to compare them to passers and runners. But against the players Tebow can be reasonably compared to — running backs and other quarterbacks — he’s the best in the country. He might be the best so far in this century, and at a quick glance he stacks up well against the best of the last two centuries.

Let’s start with his raw numbers. Tebow threw 317 passes and gained 3,132 yards for 29 touchdowns against only six interceptions. Those are outstanding numbers, though not terribly unlike what you’d find for top-flight quarterbacks in any recent season. It’s the quality of those numbers that impresses. For one thing, there was no piling on. The weakest team on Florida’s schedule was Ole Miss who, aside from their game with the Gators, was only 3–11. Tebow threw just 34 passes against the Rebels, and Florida needed all of them as they scraped out a 30–24 win. Against Vanderbilt, who was otherwise 5–6, he only threw 27 passes. In no game this season did he throw as many as 35 and, unlike some of the other Heisman hopefuls, he didn’t pad his stats against anyone.

But the real case for Tebow when compared to other quarterbacks is that he put up better stats against tougher — much tougher — opposition. Let’s match his numbers against some of the other leading passers in the country in the chart at right.

The Sooners’ Sam Bradford is ranked ahead of Tebow in passer ratings because his pass completion percentage is slightly higher (70.1% to 68.5%) and he’s thrown more touchdown passes (34 to 29). This only goes to show how misleading the passer rating system is, since pass completion percentage is pretty much irrelevant, and TD passes can easily be tacked on in meaningless situations. Tebow tops Bradford in the most vital passing stats — yards per throw (9.88 to 9.35) and interception percentage (1.9% to 2.3%). How much of an achievement is a yards per pass average of just under 10 yards a toss? Consider that no Heisman Trophy winner — not Doug Flutie or Vinny Testaverde or Matt Leinart — has ever approached it.

In any event, the brutal schedule that Florida played wipes out the arguments for all the other quarterbacks: The clincher for Tebow is that he was better against better teams.

If he needs another, let’s throw this in — Tebow swamps all the other quarterbacks in the above chart as a runner, with 838 yards for a 4.3 average and an amazing 22 TDs. West Virginia quarterback Pat White outrushed Tebow by 347 yards, but his passing stats aren’t in Tebow’s stratosphere, and Florida had tougher opponents than West Virginia.

Quarterback vs. running back arguments are always difficult to make, since a running back seldom, almost never, has the same impact on a game as the quarterback. Arkansas’s Darren McFadden is pretty much by consensus the country’s best, 304 carries for 1,725 yards and a healthy 5.7 yards per carry with 15 TDs. But the Razorbacks’ opposition, with a 64–64 W–L record, was nowhere near as strong as the Gators’, and McFadden had the advantage of playing against North Texas, Chattanooga, and Florida International — whose combined W–L records, aside from their games against Arkansas, were an abominable 4–26. About the sole argument for McFadden over Tebow is that McFadden had his best game of the year, 206 yards rushing and three TDs with one more passing TD, in a 50–48 season ender against LSU, a team Florida lost to and that “held” Tebow to 158 yards passing and 67 rushing. But against Auburn, who beat both Florida and Arkansas, Tebow passed and ran for 276 combines yards while McFadden registered just 43 yards rushing.

To understand how good and how versatile Tim Tebow is, you have to compare him to the player most analysts recognize as the best college quarterback in the first six years of the 21st century — Vince Young, who, though he didn’t win the Heisman Trophy, clearly demonstrated in the Texas Longhorns’ epic Rose Bowl victory over Southern Cal in 2006 that he was in a class by himself. Let’s compare their senior seasons at left.

It’s truly amazing how similar their stats are, but aside from having broken off a couple more long runs, Tebow is the better player — and, again, he did it against tougher opposition. So if Young, as many maintain, was the best college quarterback of this century, what does that make Tebow?

The increasing sophistication of college football has turned most quarterbacks into mere snap-takers, the main cog but still a part of the larger machine. Tim Tebow — passing or running — is the whole package; he is the machine. He’s not a snap-taker, he’s a football player, and by any objective standard, the most outstanding football player of the 2007 season.

Mr. Barra is the author of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”


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