Tebow time! (Revisited)

So here we are in 2021, and everyone's in a lather about Tim Tebow again. Time really must be a river, endlessly oxbow-ing back on itself.

Folks are in a lather because Tebow's former college coach, new Jacksonville coach Urban Meyer, is bringing him in for a look-see as a tight end. This is happening about a decade late, but Tebow first had to play out the fantasy he was an NFL quarterback. That's not his fault; he'd been a quarterbacking legend in high school and college, so of course he assumed he'd be one in the pros.

At any rate, he's suddenly all over yapping-poodle talk radio, which mines outrage the way grizzled mountain men used to mine claims back in '49. The Blob accidentally caught part of that from the yappiest of the poodles, Colin Cowherd, who was babbling the other day about what a joke this was and how Tebow was stealing another man's job and what-not.

The Blob could not roll its eyes toward its cerebellum fast enough, hearing that.

OK, first off: It's the NFL. Someone's always stealing another man's job. Players come into the league, they lock down a starting spot, they get older and slower, and finally some kid with fresher legs and less mileage on the odometer puts them on the bench. It's simply the Darwinian order of things in the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League.

Also: Meyer hasn't even gotten a chance to see if this will work. Or, more to the point, if it  won't.

Again, it's the NFL. Sentiment goes to die there. If Tebow is too old, too light and too slow to do everything NFL tight ends are asked to do these days, he'll get cut in training camp. Not even his old college coach is going to keep a guy around who can't help him.

And if that happens (and the odds are pretty good it will), how's Tebow stealing another's man job?

Look. There's no controversy here, except manufactured controversy. Even conflating this with the Colin Kaepernick situation, as some have done, is a tortured bit of false of equivalency.

Kaepernick got blackballed by the league because the people who run NFL teams are cowards and phonies. Tebow's getting a shot with Jacksonville because he passes muster politically with the NFL's flag-waving theocracy, and because the old Coacher misses him.

If Tebow had been kneeling for politically incorrect racial justice instead of for politically correct religious devotion, do you think he'd be getting another shot? And if Kaepernick, a former Super Bowl quarterback, had stayed on his feet for the sainted Anthem and kept quiet about racial justice, do you think he wouldn't be on someone's roster right now?

Of course Tebow wouldn't be. And of course Kaepernick would. 

And why is that?

Because it's the NFL, boys and girls. And the NFL is a bidness like any bidness, constantly weighing value vs. cost.

Now even Tebow Time can outlast that.