Florida Gators' Urban Meyer Not Doing Tim Tebow Any Favors

Tim Tebow will be drafted come April 22, regardless of what the sports analysts, NFL team scouts, and every nitpicking NFL fan in the sports universe thinks.

Tim Tebow will be going to the NFL

The hardest transition for any football player is to go from college to the NFL. Not just the transition to a higher level of competition, but the transition to the NFL locker room, where gaining acceptance is harder than getting an interview with Tiger Woods.

It is evident now, after his prolonged media exposure for the last four years and the recent resistance to his prayer request by his peers at the Wonderlic, that Tebow will be choosing the easy road into the NFL.

I have never been a Tebow fan. In fact, I have been quite the opposite. It doesn't seem right to me to push your religious beliefs onto another person. However, I must respect Tebow for sticking to who he is and not changing himself to take the easy road into gaining acceptance in the NFL.

He has become such an enormous figure in football, along the way amassing a large number of fans and a larger number of Tebow critics. This alone creates a clash with any locker room he enters.

Fans will jeer him anywhere he goes, his personality will clash with a countless number of ego-driven professionals, and the incident at the Wonderlic will be the first of many encounters that Tebow will have with the other soon-to-be rookies and veterans.

Urban Meyer, Tebow's former head coach at Florida, has just made the road to the NFL even more difficult for his former quarterback with his outburst against Orlando Sentinal reporter Jeremy Fowler.

Meyer, in a few seconds of screaming and hollering, showed the world that he is still protective of Tebow, even though his former quarterback has already graduated.

The outburst was the equivalent of a father yelling at a group of kids for picking on his son. The incident is going to enlarge the target on Tebow's back and is likely to make more people take a negative view on him.

If Tebow really is like a son to Meyer, then Meyer needs to do what every father must do at some point, and let his child free. He needs to have no more public impact on the reputation of Tebow, or it will without a doubt continue to make things harder on Tebow.