Tim Tebow: Broncos Thrilling Win Not Enough to Win This Critic's Heart

Let the coronation begin.

After three and a half quarters of sloppy, uninspired play, the Miami Dolphins and Denver Broncos somehow found themselves in a thriller, fueled by Denver's furious 15-point comeback over the final five minutes, and culminating in a 52-yard overtime field goal by Matt Prater to win it for the Tim Tebow-led Broncos.

And on those last two drives, Tebow, at times, looked sharp, poised and in control, as he completed a pair of red zone touchdown passes, as well running in a two-point conversion with just seconds remaining.

The media will, of course, paint Tebow as a hero, as a crunch-time juggernaut, just as they attempted to do with Tampa's Josh Freeman before the young quarterback came back to earth, much in the same way that German satellite did last month.

They'll ignore all that came before—all the miscues and mental lapses that helped cause the deficit in the first place, in silent absolution of his football sins. But I won't forget, and neither should you.

We shouldn't overlook the fact that Tebow had all of 40 yards after completing just four of his first 14 passes. It was 55 minutes of ineptitude on a scale that had even Kyle Orton muttering while the cameras watched, “He was wide [expletive] open.” To be sure, if you watched this game, “He was wide open” was a phrase you often heard following Tebow's off-the-mark throws; halfway through the fourth quarter, the Dolphins had more sacks (five) than Tebow had completions.

Even on the game-tying drive, it took Daniel Fells' diving catch of another woefully thrown ball from the Chosen One to keep the comeback going. But as they say in baseball, it'll be a line drive in the box score.

This revisionist history will begin at ESPN, where they, much in the same way they did during their quest to categorize Derek Jeter as one of the greatest to ever play the game, will festoon him with more semantic trickery than they ever needed for The Captain.

They will say that he inspires his team, that he has great intangibles—things that mean nothing, except that the player in question has not been very productive. They'll show the post-game celebration, and act as if the hugs and handshakes he received are indicative of the deep respect his teammates have for him, and somehow more meaningful than the hugs and handshakes given to other quarterbacks.

And it will all be nonsense. Just like it was when they were saying it about Vince Young.

“He's a winner,” they used to say about the former Titans playcaller. They'd tell us to ignore his 86 passing yards and instruct us haughtily to look at the scoreboard.

The same goes for Mark Sanchez and Tony Romo, both of whom are only now being held accountable for their lackluster performances.

Romo's reckoning came sooner than Sanchez's, but only after he was unduly elevated to a place beside other great Cowboys quarterbacks. For his part, Sanchez has been painted as the second coming of Namath, but his play says otherwise, and no matter how many hot dogs he munches down on the sidelines, he'll never be as eccentric as the Kolber-kissing clown prince of Gotham.

This need to link a quarterback's worth solely to a team's performance speaks to, I think, primarily the sports media's need to fill time and garner ratings.

ESPN, in that sense, is no different than Fox News or MSNBC. 24-hour news is a business first, and what's good for business at Fox is forwarding the Republican agenda; at MSNBC, it's propping up the Democrats; and at ESPN, it's quarterback worship. Sadly, the tangible result of this is a less-informed public, and, in the case of ESPN, the myth that Tim Tebow is a good quarterback.

What really happened this afternoon was that a bad Miami team believed they had a game in the bag and put it in cruise control. It was evident in the soft coverage and sudden lack of pressure, and most of all in the performance of Tim Tebow, who was beaten up and bottled up for all but the last few minutes of the game. Miami gave this game away more than Denver took it from them.

In a way, writing this article is a pointless exercise. Tim Tebow will eventually go bust and wind up as a tight end, fullback or third-string quarterback (again) on some non-contending team, and the same pundits who are now lauding him will say they always knew he was a fraud. But it's important that we change the culture of propping up quarterbacks, and we can't do that unless we talk honestly, and I hope that we can start right here, right now.