Will Tebow Go Rogue?

Ben McGrath:

“Every starting quarterback has a backup,” Mike Tannenbaum, the Jets’ general manager, said, insisting that Sanchez was still his man, and Tebow the also-ran, after the contractual squabble had been resolved. This was true in the same way that every Presidential candidate can be said to have a spouse—and Hillary’s just happened to be Bill. The Rolling Stones were once Brian Jones’s band. Tebow has now been cast as the world’s most famous supporting act. How many interceptions can Sanchez throw before Jets games come to resemble those McCain-Palin rallies in the summer of 2008, with everyone clamoring for the understudy? How long, in other words, before Tebow goes rogue?

“There can always be weirdness,” Jeremy Kushnier, an understudy on Broadway, said late last week, forecasting the complicated Sanchez-Tebow dynamic. “It’s a hard job, because you’ve got to take ego out of the equation. But, at the same time, everybody wants to be the hero.” As it happens, Kushnier had just been called into heroic action, when Josh Young, one of the leads in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” came down with a cold—during press previews, no less. “I trained to cover Jesus and Judas both,” Kushnier said, almost sheepishly. Guess which role he wound up playing? “Judas is kind of the quarterback of the show,” he said.

The Broncos were very smart to get away from this freakshow, especially with all the religious crowd out in Colorado Springs.  Better to let Tebow get pummelled by the New York media than have to deal with the hype in Denver.  The Peyton Manning move was brilliant on the Broncos part.