(AP)
When Chip Kelly plucked Tim Tebow away from his SEC Network desk and signed him to the Philadelphia Eagles, few understood the rationale. How could a guy who’d thrown eight passes in four years be a worthy roster member of a team with serious playoff aspirations. (But not serious championship aspirations because, come on, these are the Eagles.)
Then, when Chip Kelly said Tim Tebow would only play quarterback for him, even fewer understood the rationale. The assumption was that Kelly would play the mad-genius card and turn Tebow into some sort of hybrid H-Back/tight end/occasional runner via direct snap. But now he was buying into Tebow’s fantasy of the former Florida star still being a viable NFL quarterback? Something had to be up. And something is up, at least according to my grand theory about why Chip Kelly actually signed Tim Tebow.
You ready? Tim Tebow is Chip Kelly’s human shield.
With all the reporters around Tebow, Kelly gets off scot-free. (USA TODAY Sports Images)
The coach spent the offseason making the personnel moves a drunk college kid would make while playing Madden at 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. He jettisoned his best player, traded for a quarterback for whom staying healthy is as impossible as levitation, got rid of a perfectly serviceable quarterback who once provided him a 8-2 record and 27 TD/2 INT season and then overpaid a running back that his division rival deemed unworthy, mainly due to the fact that DeMacro Murray’s legs might actually fall off this season after being used so much in 2014.
Enter Tim Tebow. Eagles OTAs on Thursday originally would have featured a hostile media, ready to have a feeding frenzy about Kelly’s offseason moves. Instead, it turned into a circus about Tim Tebow. Other than covering a quote of Kelly responding to LeSean McCoy’s allegations of racism, something that no one took seriously anyway because McCoy doesn’t seem to be the most thoughtful player who’s ever donned an NFL jersey, every national outlet focused on Tebow and Tebow only.
(AP)
There were plenty of questions about other things, but no one cared. It was all Tebow, all the time. So instead of the public hearing statements of Kelly’s desire to start Sam Bradford, a quarterback whose missed 31 starts since 2011 and has an 18-30-1 overall record, or wondering why McCoy is up in Buffalo, Tim Tebow, the human shield and guy who will probably be cut by the start of September, earned a bulk of the attention at the Eagles’ first open practice of the year.
(AP)
Maybe Chip Kelly is a mad genius after all.
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