From Peter King (SI):
I've thought all along that Tim Tebow would need a redshirt year, but two things now tell me I might be wrong.
First, Denver trading the 40th, 70th and 114th picks in a power draft to pick Tebow is a powerful statement. Check out the draft trade chart that every team uses and you'll see how much Denver wanted to make sure it wasn't leapfrogged in the Tebow derby. The 25th pick is worth 720 points on the chart every team in the league uses -- some more religiously than others. The 43rd pick is worth 470, the 70th worth 240, and the 114th worth 66. That totals 776. The Broncos paid 56 more points than were necessary by the chart -- equivalent to the 199th overall pick, a late fourth-rounder -- to get Tebow. Denver, obviously, wanted to make the deal badly enough to ratchet up the compensation.
Second, and most importantly, I remember something Broncos head coach Josh McDaniels said to me over the weekend when we discussed the Tebow pick. We weren't discussing playing time, or his role, or anything at the time other than why he was smitten with the guy more than many of his peers on other NFL teams.
"When I went to Gainesville Monday to work him out,'' McDaniels said, referring to his hush-hush trip to spend the day with Tebow, "we spent about seven hours together. We went over a lot of things. Now, understand that our offense is pretty complicated, and the terminology and the scheme is totally different from what he did at Florida. But about midway through my time there, we're going through plays, and he starts using our terminology. He's so smart about football that he was able to begin to speak my language and talk apples to apples. He'd already translated what he knew of our scheme into my words. That's something that carried a lot of weight with me.''
McDaniels also said: "The football traits he has is the stuff you die for.''
That tells me McDaniels will find something this year for Tebow to do. I don't know what it is. But last year, I don't think we saw everything McDaniels had to offer in terms of offensive play-calling. There's a lot inside him I think he's waiting to script and put in the hands of some offensive talent he mined and developed.
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http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/peter_king/04/27/mailbag/index.htmlmmm-kay. Pass that pipe, Peter!