The Paul Finebaum Show is known for both reasonable interviews with college football personalities and deranged suggestions from callers. On Friday, ESPN analyst Robert Griffin III appeared on the show presumably as the former, but offered some analysis perhaps more suited to the latter. In a discussion about the Florida Gators’ search for a new head coach, Griffin suggested that they should hire…current ESPN analyst Tim Tebow.
“Here’s an outlier for you, if you have a little bit of time. My outlier is this; I think the Gators should hire Tim Tebow. I think they have to think outside the box for the next head coaching hire. The word out there is that Dan Mullen wasn’t in love with recruiting, he wasn’t in love with the process and those things. But who’s going to really out-recruit Nick Saban, Kirby Smart, and Jimbo Fisher, right?”
“So if you throw Tim Tebow in there, surround him with a structure, have about three or four previous head coaches on his staff to help him figure out the vision of his program, that’s going to bring excitement to the Florida Gators. That’s going to have people be intrigued and excited about going into Gainesville and recreating that excitement that they had oh-so-long-ago. And we’ve seen that structure with a guy like Deion Sanders before. And I know, Tebow has no coaching experience, but coaches don’t have to be Xs and Os guys, right, they have to be motivators? And that’s what Tim Tebow does best. He motivates guys. He leads. And he can be a figurehead for the Florida Gators moving forward to say ‘That’s our guy. Not only is he going to recruit, he’s going to inspire you to be better.'”
In fairness to Griffin, this is about the best possible argument you could make for a SEC school hiring Tebow, who has never coached before at any notable level. And yes, all of his points here have some level of merit. The biggest knock on recently-fired head coach Dan Mullen was his publicly-expressed lack of passion for and commitment to recruiting (especially in-season, which made him a stark contrast to the likes of always-recruiting Smart), and absolutely, Tebow could probably be a pretty good salesman for the Florida program.
Moreover, the idea of a known figure in a head coaching role even without much prior experience there and without a strong Xs and Os background has been tried recently. Cases there include Sanders at Jackson State and Herm Edwards at Arizona State (although Sanders’ time at Jackson State had had its own issues, and the NCAA investigation into Arizona State may even lead to Edwards’ ouster despite his decent record). And there have been some coaches and programs who have found success from the “head coach as CEO” model, especially if they have the right level of staff support (strong offensive coordinator, strong defensive coordinator, other experienced figures), so Griffin is smart to add those conditions to his stumping for Tebow here.
With all that said, though, hiring Tebow directly as Florida head coach would still be a much further jump than any of those previous moves. Edwards had been a head coach before (mostly in the NFL, but there’s at least some crossover there), and Sanders was a high school offensive coordinator before being hired at Jackson State (and that’s a FCS school; someone getting their first head coaching job there is much more common than it is in the SEC). And previous head-coach-as-CEO-and-recruiter types like Mack Brown and Ed Orgeron had well-established coaching resumes by that point. And it’s hard to see Tebow as a better candidate for the Gators than the other ones reportedly in the mix, all of whom have notable college head coaching experience.
So, if Tebow was hired as Florida’s coach, he would be jumping up much higher much faster than anyone in the recent past. That’s happened before for him (in minor league baseball and with his tight end attempt with the Jacksonville Jaguars), so this theory can’t be completely ruled out, but it still feels like a massive leap from Griffin at this point in time. If Florida does somehow wind up hiring Tebow as head coach this year, though, Griffin needs to open a prognostication firm.
[Paul Finebaum on Twitter; photo of Tebow with the Jaguars from Bob Self/The Florida Times-Union via USA Today Sports]