By now everyone has had enough of the cultural phenomenon that is Tim Tebow. Well, maybe not. It seems that all the Tebow haters (could conceivably be a few holdouts) actually liked his Super Bowl commercials, I guess because he made fun of himself. One commentator even claimed that Tebow is bigger than the NFL. We’ll forgive the man his hyberole, but we have to admit that Tebow’s commercials were vastly more entertaining than the Super Bowl itself. I absolutely love this quote from someone in the piece: “I don’t think anybody going into Sunday night would have thought Tim Tebow would have a better night than Peyton Manning.” Poetic justice anyone?

As the author, Mike Bianchi of The Orlando Sentinel, points out, “Tebow doesn’t need the NFL to become a cultural icon.” That’s gotta tick off a lot of people in the NFL, but probably more so in our country’s enlightened (overwhelmingly liberal) sports media. For some reason many of them reserved a special venom when it came to Tebow’s efforts to make it in the NFL. I learned in the article that this distaste for Tebow is obvious within football operations of NFL teams, thus the double standard. Bianchi states:

I still think it’s a travesty that some wayward NFL team (see Jaguars, Bucs and Dolphins) wouldn’t give Tebow a true chance to become a starting quarterback. It’s always been baffling to me why one of our three state teams – all of whom have been essentially insignificant for the last decade – have had this perplexing aversion to signing Tebow and becoming instantly interesting and relevant.

Question: Why are so many other quarterbacks who are drafted in the first-round, guys like Blaine Gabbert (Jaguars) and Josh Freeman (Bucs), given years to develop and learn from their mistakes – and, yet, they still fail?

Not Tebow. All he ever did was win – state championships in high school, national championships in college and even took the previously pathetic Broncos to the playoffs in his only year as a starter in the NFL – and he still can’t get a sniff of a job. Think about this: Until Tebow, there’s never been a QB drafted in the first round who compiled a winning record (9-7) and took his team to the playoffs in his only year as a starter and never again started a game in the league.

What makes Tim Tebow a lightening rod to some? I wondered as I was thinking about this that if Tebow was a skirt chasing playboy with attitude, would he now be playing in the NFL? The questions kind of answer themselves. With his squeaky clean lifestyle, outspoken, and acted, Christian ways, great attitude and smile for everyone, he just annoys certain kinds of people, people who happen to run NFL football teams and people who dominate sports media. Fortunately they can’t silence a cultural phenomenon.