The Eagles have signed Tim Tebow, distractions be damned. Why do NFL coaches insist on giving him chance after chance? Because he’s just like them

To grasp football’s continued obsession with Tim Tebow you must first understand the truth. He is not what he appears. That carefully wired billboard of faith and political opportunity is a front. It is real but it is not him.

The true Tim Tebow, the one known only inside football team offices, is not an outward man. He does not proselytize. Former teammates have found him alternately gregarious and awkward. He privately jokes about the perception that he is a man consumed with Christianity when in fact he is infatuated with football, collecting game films, spouting play formations from memory. In a sense, he is a football nerd, happiest when he is digesting a complicated new offense.

Why do NFL coaches keep giving him a chance?

Because he reminds them of themselves.

It is an enormous leap for the Philadelphia Eagles to sign Tebow. Football coaches loathe distraction. They spend months plotting every practice, every meeting and every team meal to ensure no moment falls from their control. Any deviation is toxic. In the world of a football coach, only order is pure.

And yet in this league that detests disorder another team has welcomed into its locker room the ultimate distraction. By now Eagles coach Chip Kelly must know what will arrive with Tim Tebow: the shirtless pictures, the breathless updates, the ocean of television cameras bobbing on the sidelines. All of it for a quarterback who hasn’t shown he can make the necessary throws to thrive in a modern game built on passing.

If anything, Tebow has long proved to be a distraction without value. Already three NFL teams have discarded him in the five years since he left college, unable to find ways to fit his skills in their systems. He was never enough of … anything. Too erratic to be a quarterback. Too slow to be a running back. Too soft at running routes to be a tight end. Taking time to develop him wasn’t worth the hassle when special press conferences had to be arranged for him after games in which he barely played.

So why in this league that can’t stand distractions does Tim Tebow get these chances? Of all the quarterbacks thirsty for opportunity who can actually make the throws Tebow never has, why did Kelly pick to be his fourth quarterback the one player who can upset whatever delicate chemistry lives in his locker room, possibly tipping the cart on the season before it even began?

What compels these coaches to fall in love with him?

The answer is not a religious one for the men who keep searching for his brilliance – Josh McDaniels, Bill Belichick and now Kelly – are agnostic when it comes to football. They don’t care about his lonesome quest to defy a league that has rejected him. Such narratives are dead to coaches who cut players for a living. They believe in him because he talks like them and thinks like them.

When alone in rooms with them he speaks not in verse or the canned metronomes that fill his press conferences but in the hard language of football. Like the day five years ago, when upon meeting the Denver Broncos coaches at the draft combine he followed a detailed description of the offense he ran at the University of Florida with an equally complex discourse on Norv Turner’s digit system and then another on the plays of the New England Patriots.

The Broncos were sold. No quarterback straight out of college, no matter his professed allegiance to minutia, does this.

“That part of it was very unique,” the Broncos then quarterback coach, Adam Gase, told me at the time.

It would have been more unique had he not done something similar a few weeks before when meeting the Miami Dolphins at the Senior Bowl.

When teams pressed for the source of his understanding, Tebow finally confessed to being a football geek. While the other players at Florida spent nights partying, he sat alone in his room, huddled with his computer and DVDs of NFL offenses, memorizing techniques, cracking the hidden codes.

And while Tebow’s innate grasp of Turner’s digit system didn’t make him a better passer, his compulsion to figure it out keeps buying him the chances that another quarterback with suspect accuracy would never get. Even if he comes with an unwelcome entourage breathing down a 24-hour news cycle. Is a fourth-string quarterback who hasn’t played an official game in more than two years and is 50-50 at best to hit his running back in the flat worth the distraction? To anyone who watched him dissect an offense he is indeed.

“Nobody works harder,” is what essentially every coach who has been around Tebow has always said. It’s a well-worn cliché, tossed carelessly around sports until the words clang hollow against empty ears. Yet with Tebow they really mean it. Nobody, in fact, does try harder. How many of these coaches have stood beside him on empty fields begging him to master the footwork that comes naturally to so many other quarterbacks? His dogged diligence kept them there, hoping his robotic movements smoothed into a precision that never arrived.

The latest to work with him is reportedly, Tom House, the former pitcher turned quarterback mentor. Perhaps House has found something the others haven’t. Maybe after all those hours of trying and trying and trying he has reached that elusive fluidity that has kept him off the field. If anyone can unlock a hidden genius in Tebow’s game it’s Kelly who seems to thrive on inventing The Next Great Thing.

Who knows how Kelly will use Tebow – as a quarterback or running back or a specialist only to be rolled out when the ball is on the goal line. This could end as badly as the three previous chances and if it does it’s hard to imagine another team calling. Not when he comes with the football paparazzi in tow.

But there is also no doubt that at some point Kelly and his new fourth-string quarterback sat in a room with plays on a board, game film in a machine and realized they were speaking the same language. Which is why Tim Tebow and all that comes with him is back in the NFL again.

