Just over a year after signing him in a high profile deal, the New York Jets have released Tim Tebow:
It was 13 months ago that the Jets welcomed Tim Tebow to the team, introducing him in their spacious field house at a news conference attended by 200 members of the news media and that snarled traffic around the team’s facility in Florham Park, N.J.
On Monday morning, the Jets cut Tebow with no pomp, a victim of circumstance. They acknowledged an experiment gone awry with a news release that said, simply, “Jets waive QB Tim Tebow.” There was no mention in that release of Tebow’s statistics with the Jets, perhaps in part because there were none worth mentioning.
He was more afterthought than asset, more distraction than revelation, a decoy who played a greater role on special teams than behind center.
Tebow, acquired last March 21 from Denver in exchange for two draft picks and $2.53 million (roughly $1.5 million of which is still owed to the Broncos), played in only 77 offensive snaps for the Jets. The Jets’ drafting of Geno Smith on Friday raised the number of quarterbacks on their roster to six, and with a potentially uncomfortable situation already existing with the looming end of the Mark Sanchez era, they finally parted ways with Tebow.
The Jets had dangled him in trade talks, hoping to foist on another team the roughly $1.5 million still owed to Denver, but no one was interested.
This isn’t really a surprise, of course. The Jets barely utilized Tebow during the 2012 season, sending him in only for a play or two every other game during the time that he wasn’t on the Disabled List, and none of those appearances were particularly impressive, particularly when compared with his 2011 season with the Broncos. Where he heads now is anyone guess. Personally, I don’t see any NFL team be willing to sign him as a starting QB and I have to wonder if he’d be willing to sit on the bench another year as a second or third stringer. Perhaps he’d have better luck in the Canadian Football League.
