At a Super Bowl dinner this year, I couldn't help but ask John Elway why he'd never done The Tebow, the one-knee mini-prayer popularized worldwide by his quarterback.

Elway is fairly religious, so he thought about it and then said, "How about this? I'll Tebow when he wins us a championship."

Add that to your list of Things You'll Never See. Right below "Lenny Dykstra, president of the United States."

Tebow is trade meat this morning after Elway used a combination of stones, guile, risk, friendship and legend to land the biggest free-agent whale in NFL history: Peyton Manning.

Manning, of course, has no business picking Denver. Cold-weather town? Green receivers? Thin backfield? Tennessee made much more sense (disregard all previous dispatches).

The reason Manning is about to become a Bronco has everything to do with one man, Elway.

This was all about Elway and what he wants and what he doesn't want. What he wants, like he wants his next breath, is a Super Bowl win as an executive. What he doesn't want is Tim Tebow.

It's not that he didn't like Tebow as a person. It's that he was frustrated with Tebow's inability to get the precise synchronization of the three- and five-step NFL drops. It's NFL Quarterbacking 101. Most guys get the knack of it in college. But with Tebow, like with really good Teflon, it never quite stuck.

Elway was also frustrated with all the dirt balls and air balls and screwballs Tebow scattered to the wind. He was frustrated that Tebow would play like Joan Rivers for three quarters and like Philip Rivers in the fourth. He was puzzled by Tebow's stats. The kid didn't even complete 48 percent of his throws. Peyton Manning completes 65 percent of his.