Why Cam Newton Has the Football IQ That Tim Tebow Doesn't

While Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow was stinking up the gridiron in today's 45-10 pasting at the hands of the Detroit Lions, rookie signal-caller Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers also fell in defeat to the Minnesota Vikings, but the duo's disparate performances highlighted just how glaringly significant the gap between the two quarterbacks is.

When Newton entered the league, many critics leveled the same sorts of charges against him that were voiced about Tebow when he entered the NFL the season before—that he was an athletic quarterback whose deficiencies in the passing game would severely limit his upside at the next level.

Where Newton is concerned, those concerns appear to have been supremely unfounded, as Newton has had little trouble moving the ball through the air, completing just over 60 percent of his passes for nearly 2,400 yards in his first eight NFL games. Tebow, however, is still a nightmarish passer, with a horrifying completion percentage of 48.7 that's right at home on the day before Halloween.

Part of this can likely be attributed to the simple fact that Cam Newton has a much stronger arm than Tim Tebow, or that the Panthers enjoy a somewhat better cast of receivers than the Broncos (although this wasn't necessarily the case before Denver jettisoned wide receiver Brandon Lloyd).

However, there's another, much more telling reason for Tebow's struggles vs. Newton's success that can't necessarily be measured statistically, and it likely says more to the difference between Newton and Tebow than any other.

Newton, simply put, has a much better grasp on the concepts needed to be a successful professional quarterback than Tebow, be it working through your progressions, releasing a pass before the receiver makes his final cut or any of the other nuances that are essential to being a starting quarterback in the National Football League.

There's no better evidence of this than in the Denver Broncos' decision to "dumb down" the offense in an effort to accentuate Tebow's strengths, which can also be interpreted as an effort to hide his weaknesses as a passer.

Cam Newton may have been compared to Tim Tebow when he entered the NFL, but now that we've seen them both in action as professionals, it's readily apparent that, so far as football acumen goes, there's simply no comparison.