The Newest Evidence On Tebow Is The Same Old Story. And My Eyes Don’t Lie.

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The career numbers are staggering by any measure, but they don’t begin to tell the story.

Let me tell you something I’ve been wrestling with for a long time, and I figured over the Fourth of July — a day built for big declarations — is as good a time as any to say it out loud.

Tim Tebow may be the greatest college football player who ever lived.

Now hold on. Don’t come at me yet. I know what you’re thinking, because it’s what I always think when somebody starts throwing around “greatest ever” like it’s a door prize.

Those words carry weight. They imply disrespect — almost by definition — to all the others who earned their place in that conversation. I still believe Jim Brown was the greatest football player I ever saw, period, full stop. Not just in college. Ever. And I saw a lot of them.

But we’re talking college football here and pressed to pick somebody — really pressed, the way an old sportswriter gets pressed when he’s been around long enough to have actually watched these things unfold in real time — I keep coming back to the same name.

Why not Tim Tebow?

I was there for all of it. All four years. From the moment he came off the bench as Chris Leak’s backup in 2006 and helped the Gators win a national championship before most people even knew how to spell his name, to the night in January 2009 when he helped lift that crystal football for a second time and the whole state of Florida exhaled as Tebow led the win over Oklahoma. I watched it happen. 

The first time he did it in 2006,Tebow was as a collaborator with Leak. The second time, two seasons later, he delivered it in a promise. That’s not a Wikipedia entry to me. That’s memory. That's will.

The career numbers are staggering by any measure, but they don’t begin to tell the story: One hundred and forty-five career touchdowns. More than 13,000 career yards. Fifty-seven rushing touchdowns — an SEC record that still stands. He was a Heisman finalist three times, and in 2007 he became the first sophomore in the history of college football to win the Heisman Trophy. Think about that the next time some blue-chip freshman takes a campus visit and the internet declares him a generational talent. Tebow actually went out and did it, at 19 years old, against grown men.

The hardware is almost embarrassing to list. Heisman Trophy. Two Maxwell Awards. The Davey O’Brien. The Manning Award. Three-time All-American. Two-time SEC Male Athlete of the Year. Two national championships. BCS Championship Game MVP. College Football Hall of Fame. At some point you run out of shelf space.

But here’s the thing about Tebow that no trophy cabinet can hold — the mythology. The stats come second.

I was in The Swamp the day Florida lost to Ole Miss in September of 2008. It was one of those upsets that felt like a gut punch, the kind of loss that breaks hearts, destroys confidence and unravels teams. And what did Tebow do? He stepped to a podium and made a promise. He promised the fans, the university, his teammates, that they would never be outworked again. He promised suffering and sacrifice and redemption, in that order. One of the greatest Double Downs since Vegas invented it. 

They put that speech on a plaque. Then they implied perpetuity with a statue.

When does a press conference statement become scripture? When Tim Tebow says it, apparently.

And then there was the jump pass in his first game against LSU. That improvised leap over the pile, the ball arcing through The Swamp air to Tate Casey. 

And then again to David Nelson in his 2009 BCS National Championship clincher against Oklahoma.

Meyer developed and first ran the "jump pass" in 2003 while he was the head coach at the University of Utah.

Urban pulled it out of his archives hat from Utah. It just happened, the way great things sometimes just happen when the right person is in the right moment. You can’t coach that. You can only be fortunate enough to witness it.

Great moments by great players stick to our memory.

Was Tebow flawless? No. Was his throwing motion something only a mother could fully love? Yes. Did he get drafted in the first round and have a long, decorated NFL career? He did not. But we’re not talking about the NFL. We’re talking about 48 games in the Swamp and Death Valley and all the other cathedrals of college football, and in those 48 games, Tim Tebow was something the sport had never quite seen before and hasn’t quite seen since.

I’ve covered a lot of football. A lot of players. Some of them were better athletes. Some of them were purer passers. Some of them left for the draft after two years and I never had to look them in the eye when things got hard.

Tebow stayed. Tebow promised. Tebow delivered.

Greatest college football player ever? I’ll leave that debate for people younger and more certain than me. But I’ll tell you this much — there is nobody else like him. Not before. Not since.

And I was there to see every single yard of it.

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Buddy Martin covered Florida football for four decades. He is the host of The Buddy Martin Show