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"FacebookPinterest\n\nHe's a quarterback. He knows it. If anyone's going to question it, it's going to be other people\u2014people who mistake Tim Tebow for a jock instead of an influencer, a Christian missionary trying to send a broader message through the medium of America's most popular game.\n\n\"My whole life, my dream has been to be a quarterback,\" Tebow's saying, his voice firm and loud as he paces the stage of this darkened arena in Jacksonville, Florida, a microphone in his hands. \"And one day, I want to be a quarterback in the NFL. But ever since I was young, people have said, 'You know what? You might be a better linebacker. You might be a better running back or tight end.' \"\n\nIt's a humid evening in May. Four months ago, Tebow led the Florida Gators to their second national championship in three years, which explains why this Night of Champions, a $15-a-head \"outreach event\" for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, has drawn a crowd of 6,200. The phones and cameras of the congregants spark and pop to capture his image. Tebow is six feet three and 245 pounds, all thick polygons and smooth flat planes and inescapable corn-fed handsomeness. He's wearing a billowy white shirt and loose-fitting jeans that somehow only underscore the solidity of his bulk, like a tarpaulin draped over a concrete pylon. You can see why coaches have always wanted to deploy his body as a battering ram.\n\nBut one day, when he was 11, his coach told him to get down on one knee and throw the football as far as he could. It was just an ercise, a drill to build his upper-body muscles. He was a linebacker then. But Tebow did as he was asked. He got down on one knee. He gripped the ball with his left hand and reared back. He swiveled his hips and swung his chest. He released the ball with a slightly sidearm motion, yet the ball flew far and true. His coach watched it go and go\u2014thirty yards, clear downfield. After that, every other position was inferior from Tebow's point of view, because no other position gave him the control that quarterback did. He had the ball in his hands on every play. And Tim Tebow wants the ball.\n\nMore than the ball itself, though, he wants the burden of having the ball, and it's that burden that Tebow's speech is now trying to tease out. \"I didn't want to be like everyone else,\" he says. He presses his lips together, sets his jaw, and frowns. \"I wanted to be better. If I did what everybody else did, then why would you look up to me? Why would I set an example?\"\n\nThe stage that Tebow's commanding is usually reserved for the likes of Toby Keith and Jamie Foxx. But tonight the performers are Tebow, his family, and a procession of Christian comics, singers, and retired athletes. The speakers just prior to Tim were his parents, Bob and Pam Tebow, who told the story of Tim's birth. Bob and Pam are missionaries. At the time of Tim's conception, they were living in the Philippines. Bob, a tall, lanky man with sun-bleached hair, said, \"I was up preaching in the mountains of Mindanao\u2026and I prayed: God, if you want another preacher in this world, give me a Timmy. Give me a son and I'll raise him to be a preacher.\" (In the Bible, the apostle Paul writes a pair of letters to a preacher named Timothy.) \"And so that night, I asked God to give me Timmy by name.\"\n\nA few feet away from Tim, his Heisman Trophy rests on a pedestal, its bronze faceplate glinting in the light. He won it as a sophomore, the first person ever to do that. In mid-January, Tebow announced that he would return to Florida for his senior year rather than enter the NFL draft. He frames that choice in moral terms, like he frames everything else in his life. He says he stayed \"to be loyal\u2014to Coach [Urban] Meyer, to the University of Florida, to the fans, to finish what I started.\"\n\nBut before that, in December, he did ask the NFL to give him a rough idea of when he might be drafted. He hasn't revealed the league's projection, but if it was anything like the unofficial projections of draft analysts, he would have been crazy to leave school just yet. Last winter, ESPN's Mel Kiper Jr., the dean of the armchair seers, projected Tebow as \"probably a third-rounder.\" To Kiper and his ilk, the kid was too mechanically weak, too reliant on his ability to run, too huge a risk. He didn't look anything like Peyton Manning or Tom Brady or Drew Brees\u2014guys who sit in the pocket and fire missiles all Sunday long. What he looked like, actually, was Vince Young. Or Alex Smith. Both strong, fast, rushing quarterbacks. Both flameouts. Perhaps Tebow could switch positions.\u2026\n\nThere it was again: the external doubt that has always clung to him. Which is why he sees this season as a chance to shoulder an awesome new burden\u2014the burden of continuing to dominate as a college quarterback while showing the world he can be a great quarterback in the NFL. These are potentially non-overlapping goals. By trying to shape himself into a pro QB, he could screw up what makes him great in college. And he'll be trying to pull this off with an entire football nation watching over his shoulder, taking notes about his every throw. Then again, no one has ever yearned so devoutly to be judged.\n\n\"When you die,\" Tebow booms, \"there's gonna be a tombstone, and on that tombstone there's gonna be a name, and there's gonna be a date. And for me, it's going to be 1987, and then it's gonna have a dash.\u2026 I want that dash to mean something. I want that dash to be special. I want that dash to represent that Tim Tebow finished strong.\" He pauses, scans the crowd, sucks in a calming breath, and the wild screams and cries nearly drown out his next line: \"And most importantly, when I get to heaven, I want Jesus to say, well done, my good and faithful servant.\"\n\n\n\nHe looks smaller in person than on TV or on a stage. Something to do with the geometry of his body, the relentless blockiness; distance turns Tebow into a cartoon. Close-up he's rounder, reassuringly 3-D, wearing a sea blue T-shirt and long ivory shorts. He grabs a hard-boiled egg from a bowl at the dining commons. With exquisite casualness, he tosses it back and forth from hand to hand without cracking the shell. It's 7:45 a.m. on a mid-March weekday, and the commons is desolate. He walks slowly\u2014walk is really the wrong word for the regal slowness with which Tim Tebow moves; glides? drifts?\u2014back to his seat, his plate heaped with three sausage patties, a syrup-drenched waffle, and five hard-boiled eggs. \"Can I get you anything to drink?\" he asks, and pours me a glass of orange juice.\n\nHis chin is stubbly. He smells strongly of deodorant, and his thick-lashed eyes are impressively serene, considering that a mere forty-five minutes ago, back in the Florida weight room, Tebow was grunting next to a painted slogan that read pain is weakness leaving the body, doing calf raises with a 300-pound offensive lineman sitting on his shoulders. (In the weight room, Tebow wore a blue spandex shirt with an orange flame crawling up the sleeve; everyone else was in gray.) He peels an egg, and I ask about his recent spring-break trip to his father's orphanage in the Philippines. \"It is just the most amazing place on earth. My favorite place to go. We went into schools, hospitals, marketplaces, and, um, preached and even played a basketball game versus the town, and I preached at halftime, and it was just a great trip. Not like a great trip\u2014it's a work trip, but\"\u2014laughing\u2014\"it's a lot of fun.\"\n\nTebow has been living in a media bubble for so long now\u2014during his senior year of high school, he and his family were tailed by a crew from ESPN, which produced a documentary titled Tim Tebow: The Chosen One\u2014that he has learned to answer questions like a famous person does, with a brief, dutiful, good-natured quote followed by a karate-like return to a neutral \"ready\" stance. He is professionally unflappable and proud of it; months later, in July, a reporter at SEC Media Days would ask Tebow if he was a virgin, and Tebow would say, calmly, \"Yes, I am,\" provoking bedlam in the press room, at which point he'd say, \"Y'all can't even ask a question. I was ready for the question, but I don't think y'all were.\" He has that ability of many highly successful people\u2014George Clooney, Obama, Oprah\u2014to flash a sideways grin so crisp and face-transforming it's basically a weapon.\n\nI ask him what it feels like to preach. \"Great,\" he says, sawing his waffle into triangular chunks. \"It's special. When I do it, I feel like I can do it with so much passion and enjoyment and boldness, because I know how much it's changed my life and gave me peace and passion and purpose for life.\"\n\nI don't get the sense that he's trying to stay on-message. It's more like the message is all there is. Not in a shallow PR sense, but in a deep and radical sense of Tebow taking this role-model thing perfectly literally. \"Obviously, your goal as a speaker is to be larger-than-life to your audience,\" he tells me, perking up when we start talking about the theory behind his rhetoric\u2014the theory of influence being his main intellectual passion, aside from the strategic aspects of football. \"You know? That's your goal. So they're into you. Okay, listening.\"\n\nWhen we're finished eating, Tebow buses my tray and we head back outside. The sky this morning is dark and heavy, sort of misting. He looks up at Florida's 88,000-seat Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, a.k.a. the Swamp. \"It's a great stadium,\" he says, and flashes that grin. He hops onto a stone statue of an alligator, strides across it without looking down, hops back to the pavement, and soul-shakes the security guard. \"What's up, primo!\" he says, bumping shoulders with the guard. \"God bless.\"\n\nWe stride through the glass doors of the James W. Heavener Football Complex, a $28 million palace lined with mahogany-colored walls. In the lobby, we stand at a brushed-steel video kiosk and watch a highlight reel of last year's SEC championship game against Alabama. Tebow is cross-armed and expressionless, crunching ice from his orange-juice cup, until he sees a clip of one of his touchdown passes\u2014he had three that day\u2014followed by a shot of a scowling Alabama fan. He bursts out laughing. \"Did you see that? She said, 'I hate Tebow.' \" He juts out his right hip and cocks his head in a sassy pose. \"I hate Tebow,\" he repeats, giggling.\n\nHis feats as a Gator strain belief. They began when he was only a freshman, playing backup to the senior Chris Leak. Urban Meyer mostly used Tebow that year as a red-zone runner, a pure brute. In Florida's 2006 game against LSU, Tebow took a snap from LSU's twenty-yard line, sprinted through the secondary, ran over two safeties, and came out clean on the other side. \"Look at that,\" the announcer shouted. \"LOOK AT THAT.\" Later in the game, with the ball on LSU's one-yard line, Tebow lunged at the line of scrimmage like he was going to smash through the pile but then suddenly pulled back, leapt two feet in the air, double-clutched, and lobbed a pass on the woozy arc of a three-point shot. The ball seemed to hang there forever\u2026until his receiver, Tate Casey, finally pulled it in for a touchdown. This was the first of Tebow's now legendary jump passes (see YouTube), and there was something simultaneously retro and fresh about the play, a vibrancy that gave you permission to indulge in cornball emotion: Yes, this is awesome, this is new.\n\n\"After my freshman year, when I just ran a lot and did trick plays, they said I couldn't throw,\" Tebow tells me. \"So the next year, I proved I could throw.\" Sure enough, Tebow threw for thirty-two touchdowns in 2007, and his passer rating was second in the nation. That alone would have made for a monster season\u2014but Tebow also ran for twenty-three TDs. This was around the time when Tebowisms started showing up on the Internet: When Tim Tebow wants popcorn, he breathes on Nebraska. Tim Tebow can get breakfast at McDonald's after 10:30 a.m. God has a Tim Tebow complex. \"And then after [my sophomore] year,\" Tebow says, \"it was, 'Well, he can throw a lot of stats, but he can't win a championship.'\" So in 2008, Tebow led the Gators to a national championship. He racked up thirty more TDs in the air and ran for twelve, breaking Emmitt Smith's school record for total rushing touchdowns. Emmitt Smith, one of the greatest running backs in the history of the NFL. \"The real question isn't 'Is Tim Tebow the best college football player of 2008?' \" wrote Allen Barra in The Wall Street Journal. \"It's 'Is Tim Tebow the best college football player of all time?' \"\n\n\n\nThis is where things get complicated. We're supposed to be living in a post-Moneyball meritocracy, where statistics take the true measure of a player's worth and some scout's idea of natural \"talent\" is therefore far less important than hard work and focused practice. Tebow would seem to be a man for our time\u2014the hardest-working kid in college football (he almost broke his shoulder during his freshman season while running \"suicides,\" diving over the finish line to beat Chris Leak: \"I gotta win,\" he said) and a statistical behemoth, the football equivalent of a Michael Bay movie: Everything's exploding, everywhere, all the time.\n\nBut scouts want to see a quarterback's firepower more narrowly contained. At Florida, Tebow plays in a \"spread\" offense, where the backs and receivers fan out across the field and the quarterback stands back in the shotgun and can read the defense before the center even snaps him the ball. But in most pro offenses, the quarterback takes the snap from \"under center\" at least half the time, drops back, scans the field for a second or two, and releases the ball before the oncoming body of a 300-pound lineman eclipses the sun. This is why pro scouts pay less attention to a quarterback's stats than they pay to his mechanics, which relate directly to his ability to release the ball quickly. And Tebow's mechanics have always been weird.\n\nOne day in April, I drove to the North Jersey home of Russ Lande, a former NFL scout who is now a draft analyst. Lande popped in a DVD of last year's Florida\u2013Ole Miss game, and there was Tebow, looking laid-back and comfortable in the shotgun, waggling his ass like a tennis player waiting for a serve. He took the snap, reared back, jerked his head, and overthrew his receiver. Incomplete. \"Yeah, he does a windup,\" Lande said, taking a sip from a fifty-two-ounce Bubba Keg of diet cream soda. \"That's an extra second. He's got a little hitch.\" As we moved through the game, Lande seemed to whipsaw between admiration and agony, sometimes on back-to-back plays: \"He has the physical tools, jeez\u2026 Didn't put enough zip on it\u2026 Oh, oh, look at this. God damn.\" It was clear that Lande disliked Tebow's mechanics, but the mechanics weren't the main issue. The major question remained Tebow's ability to adjust to the sped-up complexity of an NFL-style offense, and that was probably unknowable; without a better sense of Tebow's intelligence, Lande couldn't even venture a responsible guess. So that's what Lande was dying to know. That's what he asked me as I walked out the door, knowing that I had already met the Chosen One: \"Is the kid bright?\"\n\n\n\nIn the Tebows' church, the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, there's a pool. It's encased in Plexiglas and positioned high above the pulpit and the 300-person choir and the live orchestra and the two JumboTron-sized screens. Its purpose is serious\u2014it's where the actual baptisms happen\u2014but the pool at First Baptist is all about jaw-dropping spectacle. The house lights go down, focusing attention on the pool, which glistens in that special shade of chlorinated green-blue, a color that you swear you can smell, the pungency of the public pool of your youth, only jazzily, brightly lit, so that each wave sloshes a zebra pattern onto the ceiling and the wall. The candidates for baptism enter from the left, move toward the pastor, get dunked, and make way for the next person\u2014a slow, hypnotic conveyor belt of piety. On the Sunday I visited First Baptist, the baptisms were followed by a sermon about circumcision, delivered atop a long, broad slab of dark granite chiseled with the many names of God. almighty. the lawgiver. king of the ages. Tebow circumcised a few kids on one of his trips to the Philippines. He said afterward that it was nerve-racking but it had to be done. Those kids needed the surgery. So he just held the knife and cut.\n\nTebow's self-confidence is so deep, so profound, that it's hard to get a read on what's powering it. It could simply be stunning arrogance. Or it could be arrogance's cousin, earnest ignorance. It could also be sheer slow-wittedness, but I don't think so, because I had a chance, in a borrowed coach's office in the Heavener, to fire a bunch of questions at Tebow about quarterbacking and God.\n\nWhat do you pray for when you pray? \"Oh man. Everything. Gosh. I don't know. Everything that's on my heart. You know, everybody thinks prayer is this crazy thing. Prayer is just talking to God.\u2026 I mean, to me, it's just like talking to my father. So I'll talk about all sorts of things. I'll pray during a game. 'Lord, help me with this play.\u2026 I want to give You the honor and glory.' \"\n\nGod is present during a football game, then? \"Absolutely. Yeah.\"\n\nHow do you know He's present? Tebow smiles and furrows his eyebrows. \"Well, I know He's present because He's there with me.\"\n\nThere's no ego or defensiveness in his response, just slight perplexity at the question, at my misunderstanding of this most basic premise of the evangelical tradition\u2014God is a personal God. But no problem. Tebow's ready to explain it. Evangelicals expect to meet with resistance and confusion, and they're well armored for it\u2014the Tebows more than most. \"I read them Scripture in the womb,\" Bob told me. \"Kids in the womb, they hear, they feel.\"\n\nFirst Baptist is a hard-line megachurch; the pastor, Mac Brunson, has said that September 11, Hurricane Katrina, and the recession are evidence of God's wrath against a sinful nation. But the Tebows' evangelical style is miles away from fire and brimstone. They speak of love, not hell. When Tim and his two brothers, Robby and Peter, were old enough (15), Bob started taking them on trips to the Philippines. They'd set up shop in some village, string a bedsheet between a couple of coconut trees, and show a movie about the life of Jesus, translated into the Tagalog dialect. Then Bob would stop the movie and preach, and so would the kids. \"They were nervous the first time, and probably many times after that,\" Bob says. \"But it's like riding a bicycle. Put 'em on it, push 'em, and let 'em fall down.\"\n\nIn the Tebow family, it was natural: You went to the Philippines, and you preached the Gospel to foreign people, and you watched your dad go out into the mountains, and you hoped he wouldn't die if some rebel pulled a gun on him. (Bob once told a newspaper reporter that if he were killed while preaching, it would be \"the best thing that could ever happen.\") And then you measured your own commitment to your life and your faith by the yardstick of a father who didn't just admit the possibility of martyrdom but actively dreamed of it.\n\nIf Tim is the most competitive of the Tebow kids, it's partly because he had the most to overcome. Pam was sick with amoebic dysentery when she was pregnant with him; the doctor recommended an abortion, Pam refused, and Tim was born runty and weak. He grew up hearing the story of how he was almost aborted. He became obsessed with being strong. His brothers would go looking for him at night, when he was supposed to be in bed, and they'd find him out in the family's barn, among the cows and chickens, lifting weights. When he played T-ball, the league didn't keep score in the games, but Tim kept score in his head. He had to win. But it wasn't enough to just win. He had to be a crucial engineer of the victory. In high school, he spent his freshman year at Trinity Christian, a football factory in Jacksonville. He was a starting linebacker and the backup QB. Trinity won the state championship. Tim was miserable. Why? The coach ran a traditional run-oriented offense, and he had no plans to change it. So Tim left. He went to a public school that had gone 2-8 the year before\u2014Allen D. Nease, in Ponte Vedra\u2014and became an instant star at quarterback, setting every major offensive record in the state. In his senior year, with the ESPN cameras rolling, Nease went 13-2 and won the state championship.\n\nThis is the thing about Tebow: He runs on doubt, on his own sense of his life's adversity. In September 2008, after Florida lost a bitter game to Ole Miss by one point, 31\u201330\u2014the same game I watched with Russ Lande\u2014Tebow sat at his locker, crying and praying. Then he walked into the press area, answered a few questions, and said, \"And, uh, I just want to say one more thing. To the fans and everybody in Gator Nation, um\u2026\" He paused to compose himself. \"I'm sorry.\" His voice dissipated himself. \"I'm sorry.\" His voice dissipated like he'd been punched. \"I'm extremely sorry.\u2026 I promise you one thing. A lot of good will come out of this. You will never see any player in the entire country play as hard as I will play the rest of the season. You will never see someone push the rest of the team as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the season.\u2026 God bless.\" (Barack Obama later praised Tebow for the speech, saying, \"That's the kind of leadership that you want to see from all our young people\u2014taking responsibility, challenging yourself and others, rising to the moment.\") The Gators won the rest of their games in 2008, including the BCS championship against Oklahoma, sealed by a Tebow jump pass with three minutes left. He played that day with the Biblical citation john 3:16 painted in the ovals of eye black on his cheeks; during and after the game, \"John 3:16\" was the top search phrase on Google. \"Millions of people lookin' up what's under my eyes,\" Tebow says, shaking his head. \"That's amazing, the platform that football gives you.\"\n\nIt's fair to say that Tebow's social intelligence, at least, is off the charts. He's a people pleaser; an influencer has to be liked before he can influence. He understands the endearing power of a big guy acting goofy. He gets onstage at country concerts and grabs the microphone from the likes of Kenny Chesney and Brad Paisley and sings, tunelessly, horribly. (Again, see YouTube.) And because his parents never taught him to be afraid of pop culture, since one day he might have to use pop culture to reach people, he's not a scold. In the weight room, I saw Tebow mouthing the words to the aggressive hip-hop that gets piped in, and he mentioned to me later that he recently saw the movie Taken, a torture-heavy revenge flick starring Liam Neeson as an ex\u2013CIA agent on a mission to save his daughter from being deflowered by an Arab sheikh. \"Yeah, it's awesome, it's crazy,\" Tebow said.\n\nAll these humanizing details tend to take the edge off the fact that Tebow's entire role-model persona doesn't work unless he can convey that, fundamentally, he's better than you: stronger, more capable, more at peace, just basically happier. This is what the people who make fun of Tebow are skewering\u2014his cult of personality. When Obama invited the Gators to the White House earlier this year, the sports blog Deadspin ran a picture of Tebow's \"steely-eyed Manshake\" with the president under the cheeky headline our two greatest leaders make a pact to save the world.\n\nBut in Gainesville, in close quarters with 52,000 other students, where there's already a statue of him, seven feet tall, carved from an oak tree\u2014\"Tim Treebow\"\u2014he's universally adored. I try to find people to talk shit about him. I fail. Out of sheer desperation, I spend a few drunken hours at a local bar called the Swamp, sticking a microphone into the faces of plastered students. A sampling:\n\n\"I think he's fuckin' Superman. He's got an S on his chest.\"\n\n\"He's a cool-ass, respected fuckin' guy.\"\n\n\"I ran into Tebow one time, out on the sidewalk. He was with all his friends, and I asked him if I could take a picture with him. But my batteries died. I said I had some batteries in my truck, can you wait here? He said, Yeah, no problem. I came back ten minutes later. He was sitting here, by himself, waiting for me to take a picture. Any other person would have just left with their friends.\u2026 Then he offered me his number so when I got it developed he could autograph it. That's Tim Tebow.\"\n\nOf all the people I talk to, nobody praises him more highly than his coaches. \"Yeah, um, he's changed my family's life,\" says Urban Meyer. \"It's much deeper than football with this guy. The way I look at things is completely different.\u2026 I had strong beliefs. But never to the point where\u2026\" Meyer pauses. \"There was a reason that Tim came to Florida.\"\n\nIn 2005, when dozens of coaches were recruiting Tebow, Meyer spent countless hours with Bob and Tim, talking about the spread offense and Jesus Christ. In Meyer's office today, there's a blowup of him and Tebow standing together at the 2007 Heisman ceremony. \"I can't go a day without communicating with him,\" Meyer says. \"I call it vitamin Tebow.\" But this coming season will challenge the strength of their bond. Meyer is already taking a lot of crap from sports bloggers who want to know if Meyer will \"ruin\" Tebow for the NFL just like he had \"ruined\" Alex Smith, an athletic QB he once coached to collegiate glory. Smith was the number one pick in 2005, with the 49ers, where he promptly went bust.\n\nDuring my interview with Tebow, Meyer had popped his head into the room, shot a quick glance at me, and then turned back to Tebow and said flatly, \"Is this going to help us win any games?\" Tebow laughed. Meyer didn't. Meyer closed the door slightly, like he was going to leave, but then he reopened the door and said to Tebow, \"They've been workin' since seven [in the morning].\" He meant that the team had been down in the weight room, lifting. Of course, Tebow had been there, too. But he corrected his coach in the gentlest way. \"I've actually been workin', too,\" Tebow said, \"a little bit.\" It was hard to tell if Meyer was kidding about any of this, but my sense was: no.\n\nSo that's the context for my exactly ten-minute interview with Meyer, which takes place at a conference-room table lined with glossy photos of Meyer hoisting the crystal BCS trophy. He's going to autograph these as he talks to me. Multitasking. Meyer's slim and wiry, and his gray hair is closely cropped. I ask him if he thinks Tebow can be a quarterback in the NFL. His lip curls into a wry, crooked smile. \"Well, he certainly doesn't have the skill to play quarterback in some franchises,\" he says. \"'Cause they're not very good.\" His voice is dry and deep and excruciatingly quiet. He's either subtly enjoying the interview or he's about five seconds away from erupting into a plume of rage. Meyer continues, \"He's certainly got the skill to play for the New England Patriots. Their head coach is a very, very dear friend of mine.\" (Indeed, Bill Belichick, who runs an offense similar to Meyer's, has said, \"It's going to be very interesting to see what happens when Tebow comes into this league.\" Nobody is saying that Tebow would challenge Tom Brady for his job; that said, any quarterback is one blind-side sack away from retirement, and the 32-year-old Brady did spend the 2008 season on the bench with a torn ligament.)\n\nMeyer seems to relax into his line of thought. \"I visit NFL teams every year. There's certain ones I won't visit, because I don't care. I watch 'em play. There are other ones that are at the highest level, they win Super Bowls. Man, they're doin' stuff. Those other ones, I won't walk across the street. Because there's just no creativity. They draft people that maybe are of questionable character. They draft people who aren't winners. But they run fast. So can Tim play quarterback? Sure. Just like, Can Matt Stafford [the 2009 number one draft pick, who went to the 0-16 Lions] play quarterback? Absolutely. I'm still convinced that Alex Smith can be a great quarterback. But can they play quarterback on really bad teams that haven't drafted well? No.\"\n\nMeyer adds that he's obligated to get Tim \"so-called ready for some franchise that's really important to him.\" Meyer hired a new quarterback coach in January, and the new coach has been teaching Tebow how to take snaps from under center. At the same time, Meyer says, \"I don't know if we're going to utilize it in the fall.\" Meyer has a system that works beautifully as is. Pretty soon Tebow will be gone, but Meyer will still be here, and so will the Heavener, its six-foot-high glass panels selling gator excellence to the next crop of slack-jawed recruits.\n\nAt the end of one of my days in Gainesville, I walk out of the Heavener with one of my press minders, Steve McClain. To our left, two guys are standing on a ladder, pounding a plaque into the building's wall with the butt end of a hammer. I get closer and see that the plaque is the text of Tebow's Ole Miss speech, etched into the steel in capital letters. At the top, it says the promise, and at the bottom, it says god bless.\n\n \"Urban's really into the pageantry of college football,\" McClain says.\n\n\n\nA word that Tebow uses a lot is special. It's special to preach. It's special to give a small gift to an orphan, or to win a state championship. God's plan for each of His children is special. Everything that's good is special, apart; everything that's special is good and justifiable and worth fighting for.\n\nThe NFL has been unkind to players who enter the league proclaiming their specialness. But this is perhaps Tebow's greatest gift, his most relevant evangelical skill. He has a record of influencing not just his teammates but whole systems; he convinces people that he is, always and forever, a special case. He was a special case as a 15-year-old, when he was allowed to handpick the team he wanted to play for while being homeschooled by Pam; now there are \"Tim Tebow laws\" under consideration in the legislatures of at least three states, spelling out the rights of homeschoolers to play sports. And now he's asking the NFL to consider him, again, a special case\u2014a player who won't succumb to the same pressures or limitations as similar players who failed before him.\n\nSome will call bullshit. Are calling bullshit. \"He's going to be the most debated guy in ten years,\" Russ Lande says. \"It's going to be a circus with this kid. Oh, my God.\" But Tebow has this way of making you feel like there's no relevant history to contend with. Like you can just sweep all of that aside\u2014the hand-wringing about Young and Smith, the statistics and the metastatistical arguments about what the statistics aren't capturing. He manages to convey that, in some intangible but very real sense, he won't even be breathing the same air. Which is, of course, absurd. He's human. Prick him, he bleeds. Sack him, he gets up gingerly. It's only the aura that's different. It's only the intangible and maybe irrational sense that, of all the men who've made this same promise before, Tebow will be the one to keep it.\n\n\"Jesus said, Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any one man hear my voice, I will come in to him and dine with him and he with me.\"\n\nThis is Tim's father, Bob Tebow, wrapping up the Night of Champions. Tim has just finished speaking and has sat down in the front row, listening to Bob close the deal. \"He wants to make you God's child,\" Bob's saying. \"He wants to forgive your sins. He wants to give you eternal life.\" The night's program has run long, and soon Bob goes beyond his allotted minutes. The venue's employees take flanking positions around the stage. The house lights click on. Bob extends his hand to the crowd and gives a beseeching wave. \"Give me a few minutes. You come, right now, moms, dads, boys, girls\u2026 You come.\"\n\nThe venue people cut off his sound.\n\nBob sets his mike down, turns to the sixty or so people who have come close enough to hear him, and speaks to them in his unamplified voice. \"I want you all to know,\" he says\u2026and I can't hear the rest, because he's drowned out by a loud rock song on the PA system and also the noise of a crowd dislodged and freed, in motion, pulled toward some large force gliding across the floor. It's Bob's son Timmy, warping the gravity of the arena as he makes his way back to his dressing room in a throng of Gators fans, signing programs and miniature footballs, tossing them blindly and casually behind his back. Soon enough, Tim Tebow will have a far bigger microphone within his grasp. He will stand at the door of the NFL and knock. And he will be ready to come in, if any team has faith enough to ask.\n\njason fagone is a Philadelphia-based writer. This is his first story for gq"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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