After an overtime upset of the Pittsburgh Steelers last weekend, Tebow’s Broncos play the top-seeded New England Patriots on Saturday. For at least one more media cycle, there will appear to be no way to separate Tim Tebow – the person, the quarterback, the Christian – from his religion.

But back in September, the cultural critic Toure asked a fascinating question in ESPN the Magazine. In a piece called “What if Michael Vick were white?,” Toure argued with those who said the quarterback would not have received a two-year sentence for dogfighting if he was white. Would he have been involved with dogfighting? Would an entourage have led him to the same mistakes? Would he have had a stronger paternal relationship?

So I ask, what if Tim Tebow were Muslim? How would our society react if during every interview, Tebow said “Insha’Allah” or “Allāhu Akbar” rather than thank his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ? Or instead of falling to one knee and praying,  Tebow pulled out a prayer rug and faced Mecca? A recent study by the Pew Research Center suggests it would not be well received. While American Muslims in general tend be satisfied with their lives and communities in the United States, 55 percent report that being Muslim in the U.S. has become more difficult since Sept. 11. Twenty-eight percent report that people have viewed them with suspicion and 22 percent report having been called offensive names. The TLC show “All-American Muslim” has lost advertisers who were pressured by groups claiming that the show was Islamic propaganda. Yet Pat Robertson claims that the United States is a breeding ground for anti-Christian bigotry.

I don’t have answers to these questions. We can’t know the answers until we are faced with a prominent Muslim athlete who is willing to be so visible with his faith. In a country that consistently prides itself on freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of religion – we can hope that Muslim athletes who are visible with their faith would find themselves just as revered as Tebow is for his.

But professional Muslim athletes are hard to find. Ahmad Rashād. Rashaan Salaam. Kareem Abdul-Jabaar. Hakeem Olajuwon. Rasheed Wallace. Most of these athletes are retired and went about their religious lives quietly. But it is to that list of retired professionals that we must look to find someone as outspoken about their faith as Tim Tebow – Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Muhammad Ali, for example.

In 1990, Chris Jackson was drafted by the Denver Nuggets out of Louisiana State University. In 1991,  Jackson converted to Islam. In 1993, he changed his name to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. In 1996,  Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem at an NBA game. A religious storm followed.

Everyone had an opinion, from fans to sports writers to radio hosts. Sports Illustrated reported that some people suggested Abdul-Rauf be deported. Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was born in Mississippi, however, and deportation from Colorado to Mississippi is rare. Two Denver-area radio hosts even walked into a mosque with a stereo playing the Star Spangled Banner. One was wearing a turban. And a Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf T-shirt. While broadcasting live, on air.

Abdul-Rauf claimed in a 2010 interview with HoopsHype.com that “[a]fter the national anthem fiasco, nobody really wanted to touch me.” He played only three more seasons in the NBA before going overseas to play professionally. In that same interview, he discusses how his home in Mississippi was burned down just a few months prior to Sept. 11. He eventually left the state.

So Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf stood up (or in this case, sat down) for his religious beliefs. He made his religion a visible aspect of his life and a visible aspect of his professional basketball career. Just like Tim Tebow. The difference of course being that Tim Tebow was satirized on “Saturday Night Live.” Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf had his home burned down and felt blacklisted from the NBA.

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf pales in comparison to the outspoken nature of Cassius Clay. In 1964, Cassius Clay announced his membership in the Nation of Islam, and  changed his name to Muhammad Ali. In 1966, Ali spoke out against the draft and became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War based on his religious beliefs. In 1967, Ali was convicted of draft evasion.

But even before his conviction, Ali was causing controversy. Sports Illustrated dubbed Ali the most hated athlete in the world in April 1966. In the same article, Ali’s faith was referred to as being a part of his “fanatically religious side.” Instead of being something to admire, his faith was inconceivable fanaticism. No Christian leader supported Ali’s display of Islamic faith in the same way that Muslim leaders have supported Tebow’s display of Christian faith. Just like Tebow, though, Ali – the person, the boxer, the Muslim – could not be separated from his religion. This was never clearer than in his conscientious objection to the war in Vietnam.

By now, even casual boxing fans are familiar with Ali’s quote “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong … No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” That one quote made Ali a social activist. And his social activism was based on his faith. Ali claimed that Islam prohibited war unless called for by Allah. That one belief made Ali’s religion a wider social issue. What followed was public outcry. Ali was stripped of his championship belt, had his boxing license suspended, and was convicted of draft evasion. The Supreme Court ultimately overturned it. But for four years, Ali, arguably the greatest boxer of all time, did not fight.

So Muhammad Ali stood up (or in this case, sat out) for his religious beliefs. He made his religion a visible aspect of his life and a visible aspect of his professional boxing career. Just like Tim Tebow 40 years later. Just like Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf 30 years later. Ali was an outspoken proponent of his religion, Islam, but was vilified for his outspoken religious beliefs. His Islamic beliefs.

Again I ask, what if Tim Tebow were Muslim? He’s not. So maybe it doesn’t matter. There is no way to separate the man and the religion. Some people praise him for it, others recoil. When this happens, avid defenders of Tebow invoke freedom of religion. But as Tebowmania makes its way into politics, sports, religion and the everyday life of the mainstream United States, it is important to think about how we approach religion in this country. How we approach religious freedom in this country. Do we accept freedom of religion, any religion? Or do we accept freedom of Christianity?

I’m not a sports fan, as a rule. My progressive high school required that girls learn to play football, and my main memory from those gym classes is that I could throw a football with no more accuracy than I could throw anything else. I haven’t learned much in the intervening years. I remain unclear on what “intentional grounding” is. I am unsure what a neutral zone infraction consists of, and how that differs from encroachment. I don’t know who’s in what division, including my own home team, the Rams, although I do know enough to lament them, generally.

But every Sunday and Monday night during football season I am on the couch, drawn by the responsive logic of the game: players moving like pieces in a scheme, which is satisfying in the same way spy or heist movies are satisfying. If this, then this. If that, then the other. The shouting, chest-beating masculinity. The muscles wrapped up in spandex, the end-zone celebrations clearly practiced before a mirror, the physical intelligence masquerading as athletic talent, the intensity of focus on one, purely pointless endeavor. The players within their helmets remind me of a theatrical production I saw a few years ago, “Antigone” with masks, the actors learning how to speak through their motions. This is how I felt as a child, as if I’d been denied a face: wrapped up in a body that didn’t work the way I wanted it to and unable to communicate across the space between me and the world.

My father and I have had a difficult relationship. As a child I usually felt that he and I were equally strange and silent, and equally unable to reach across the gap between us. He took me fishing, and I would cast a few times, then lie in the bottom of the boat reading or reorganizing my tackle box. I would catch catfish by accident and he would have to unhook them as they (and I) squirmed, and toss them back. We went hunting, and I would shoot targets in the yard but refused to shoot a quail. He read Hemingway to me at night but, lying across his elbow, I would scan to the bottom of the page and wait impatiently for his voice to catch up.

Like him I am shy and halting in conversation, and usually prefer quiet. At least watching football, I knew when to cheer, and when to groan theatrically with disappointment, and I knew that my father and I were reacting in the same way at the same time. Our relationship has been marked by blowups and tentative rapprochement for nearly as long as I can recall, and it is not one that has changed much over the years. With adulthood, awkwardness has settled between us instead of comfort: a fear of the wrong move, a sense that a false step will shatter the peace.

When my father and his second wife were divorcing, I was determined to keep myself neutral. This was the third divorce for me as a daughter — my parents, my mother’s second husband, my father’s second wife — and I could not, I decided, keep my own sanity while engaging with the divorce in any way. The equanimity that came from this neutrality lasted precisely until the moment my father, his voice on the phone quiet with anger, said to me, “Do you know that your stepmother has put you down as a witness to testify at trial?”

I saw this as a sign that keeping out of it would be harder than I’d thought.

My father sent me emails and text messages about the divorce. They got angrier: at my stepmother, at the courts, at the world he lived in where his youngest daughter, my sister, could be in someone else’s home, out of his reach. He, like me, masks sadness in rage.

Then I got caught in it. If I wasn’t with him, I was against him. His notes started saying things like, “I have tried.” They said “why don’t you” and “you should” and “please.” They were signed, “your father.” I cried until blood vessels burst under my skin.

I didn’t let my father hear me cry. I didn’t answer his notes, either. Instead I shredded my fingernails and broke out in cystic acne that made moving my face painful. Finally I said to him on the phone, “We aren’t having this conversation.” I started screaming: “I’ve told you I won’t have this conversation with you.”

“I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong,” he said. I went into hysterics and hung up. For the next few weeks I ignored his calls, picked at my skin, and watched a lot of football.

Then my grandmother called me from Houston, where my family lives. I had decided not to visit until my father was over the divorce, or at least over talking about it with me. “We’re having a Christmas party,” she said. She sounded hopeful, which is not a tone my grandmother customarily uses. “I was thinking you might want to come. I’ll buy you a ticket. Also,” she added, “my mother is in the hospital.”

My great-grandmother is 99, although in her mind she’s been 90 for several years. She is fragile. The equation had changed. If this, then that.

I bought the ticket. “I’m staying with Grandma,” I said to my father in an email. He wrote back: “Stay with her Sunday night. Monday with me.” I didn’t respond. I was strung out with nerves; I packed my suitcase in a more obsessive fashion than usual, dividing my toiletries by type into Ziplocs, putting my shoes into plastic bags, rolling each item of clothing individually, down to underwear. I watched the Broncos beat Chicago and yelled at the screen: “You little prick,” I spat at Tebow. “You lucky overrated jackass.”

My father picked me up at the airport and I was strung tight. I hugged him with one arm instead of two, hanging on to my suitcase with the other. Don’t say anything, I thought at him, so hard he must have felt it. If you say a word about your divorce, I am back on that plane.

When my father and stepmother first split up, he got a new job and a small apartment. He cut his life down to its bones — cookbooks, a few fishing rods, the ties and plain white shirts he had to wear to work. He lost 40 pounds. He stopped, as far as I knew, watching football. Once he called me during a game: “Who’s playing?” he asked me, and I told him — it was the Vikings that night—and he laughed a sad sort of laugh and said, “I have to ask you who’s playing.” I watched games at night knowing that my father wasn’t watching them with me.

From the airport we went for Tex-Mex. It was beautiful out, high 60s and sunny. We went in the restaurant to order and he pointed to two spots at the bar. “Why not outside?” I asked him and he grinned a little, looking sheepish, and pointed at the television over the bar: the Houston Texans, who had just clinched their first playoff spot, were on.

“Have you been keeping up with the Texans?” he asked me, as we settled in.

I told him that the games weren’t shown in St. Louis. “We have to watch the Rams.” I ordered a margarita, and drank it too fast. My head pitched a little.

“I heard commentators talking about how that Rams-Seahawks game was the worst Monday Night Football they’d ever seen,” he said. “I didn’t watch it.”

“I went to sleep in the second quarter.”

The screen kept cutting in and out, and every time it went out, the noise in the bar rose and rolled with groans. Every time it came back, there was a cheer and a collective leaning forward.

My father asked me what the sports writers were saying about the Rams. “What are they going to do about it?” he asked, sounding exasperated. I reported what the writers were saying: For god’s sake do something about the defensive line. Poor Sam Bradford. Fire the coach.

I took bites from the food on my father’s plate when I finished my own, and ordered another margarita. Houston was losing to Carolina, bitterly; I alternately celebrated and smacked the bar with my hand in disappointment. Next to me, my father celebrated and smacked the bar at the same time.

A few weeks later, during the first half of a Saints-Falcons game, I texted my father. “Are you watching this?” I asked him. “It’s pretty good.”

“It’s VERY good,” he texted back.

I knew he was sitting in front of the game with a whiskey or one of his home-brewed IPAs. I was eating kettle corn straight out of the bag, my feet on a pillow. We were waiting for Drew Brees to break the single-season passing record, which he did, beautifully, on a touchdown pass that came after such a string of missteps that it almost seemed he’d set up the drive that way on purpose.

Cosell was the King of Sports, for a time at least, because he asked questions that other people wouldn’t and wasn’t worried about ruffling feathers. What did concern him, though, was what everybody thought of this tough-talking lawyer out of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Mark Ribowsky’s new biography, “Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports,” chronicles how the man’s massive ego and equally outsize insecurity worked in tandem to push him into nearly every American’s living room, first as the host of a radio show, “Speaking of Sports,” and then breaking into television as a sports anchor for WABC in New York — and really makes you glad you never worked with the guy. Cosell never forgot — or forgave — anyone who said or wrote something unpleasant about him. And pretty much everybody in the sporting and broadcast worlds fell into that category at some time or another before the sportscaster’s death in 1995 of a heart embolism.

“Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. I have been called all of these,” Cosell once said. “Of course, I am.” Such moments of self-awareness are refreshing, since Cosell generally felt free when off the air to let loose on security guards, underlings, and bosses alike with the tired “Do you know who I am?” tirade. And you can be sure American TV viewers of the late 1960s and ’70s knew who his public persona was. That was partially due to the relationship Cosell struck up with Muhammad Ali when the boxer was still called by his birth name, Cassius Clay. The pair had a special chemistry, and each used the other to enhance his own fame. When Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title in 1967 after refusing, on religious grounds, to be drafted into the U.S. Army for the Vietnam War, Cosell, who had been a major in the Army during World War II, emerged as one of the few public voices backing him. The building up of Ali, a true culture changer, may be Cosell’s greatest legacy (along with his part in creating “Monday Night Football” as a program and an institution).

Ribowsky’s book is not a glorification of Cosell. In fact, it is often unrelenting in showing just how egotistical, bombastic, highly unpleasant and extremely insecure he could be. Although the personality on display here is definitely unpalatable, Ribowsky is not only concerned with likability. He constructs a good case for thinking that the tough journalism of Cosell’s earlier years shifted the future of sports coverage (and it certainly appears that Cosell was a lonely pioneer). But the culture also completely changed around Cosell, especially with the introduction of 24/7 broadcast news. The sports journalists who now seek out the tough stories may owe Cosell something, but mostly just a tip of the hat.

And it’s not as if Cosell finished out his own run without practicing lazy or soft journalism. He ultimately gained too many friends in the higher echelons of the sporting world — and enmeshed himself in too many petty squabbles — to allow anyone to accept him as an unbiased reporter. What we’re left with is primarily the memory of that voice. Loud though it still rings, the diminution is little short of tragic.

On Fox News, Tebow’s 7-1 record this year is just the latest reason to attack a liberal straw man. “Tim Tebow’s success as the quarterback of the Denver Broncos has done little to silence his critics, who believe that his faith in Jesus Christ has no business on the football field,” writes Todd Starnes. “It doesn’t matter how many touchdown passes he throws or how many games he wins because Tebow will always be a lightning rod for anti-Christian bigots.”

Well, always is a long time, and apologists like Starnes do Tebow no good when they imply that all his critics are anti-Christian bigots. Indeed, on Salon last week, Andrew Leonard made the liberal case for loving Tebow. “Maybe this country would be better off if everyone, left or right, evangelical or atheist, pocket passer or option quarterback, occasionally found room in their hearts to cheer for those who are different,” he wrote.

But why do we need to change our opinions about Tebow at all, either as a person or a football player?

Tebow, after all, wouldn’t be a lightning rod for anything if he were not a football player. So how good is he? First, let’s dispose of the myth currently being taken as gospel by much of the sports press and nearly all Denver Broncos fans: that Tebow as a professional quarterback is simply a winner.  He was in college. In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2008 that “Tim Tebow is on track to become the greatest quarterback in college football history.” That was before I saw Cam Newton play. Still, Tebow was, if he’ll pardon the expression, damned good.

But as a pro, to cite chapter and verse, Tebow has been lousy, or not far north of mediocre at best. Going into this Sunday’s game with the New England Patriots, Tebow has thrown 280 passes, completing just under 49 percent. This season he is the 14th-ranked passer in the 32-team league, and though he has thrown 11 passes for touchdowns with just two interceptions, in the most important single passing stat, yards per throw, he ranks 27th.

Broncos fans, I hear you — the most important stat is winning, not yards per throw. But in only one game during the Broncos’ much publicized six-game winning streak have they scored more than 25 points, and in four of them they’ve scored 17 or less. The Denver defense, on the other hand, has been outstanding. Since their Nov. 6 victory over Oakland, they have given up an average of only 17 points per game, allowing 13 or less in four games. If Denver fans want to shout “Hallelujah,” they should start with the Broncos’ defensive unit.

The 13-10 victory over the Bears this past Sunday was more typical of the 2011 Denver Broncos than not. Tebow and the offensive unit failed to produce any kind of score during their first 11 possessions and survived only because Chicago played with astounding ineptitude. The only reason the Broncos got a chance to win was because Bears running back Marion Barber ran out of bounds near midfield with less than two minutes on the clock. This gave Denver time, when they got the ball on the ensuing punt, to move into field goal range (which, in Denver’s altitude-thinned air, is just any time you cross the 50-yard line). A smiling Tebow told reporters after the game, “I might have thanked the Lord when he [Barber] did that. [Otherwise] we might have only had about 10 seconds left on the game when we got the ball.”

For his part, the Lord tweeted, “Don’t thank me. I didn’t tell that putz to run out of bounds.” Presumably He also didn’t tell Barber to fumble the ball away at the Denver 36 in overtime, thus setting up the Broncos’ game-winning field goal.

I hated Tim Tebow before I knew anything about his religion. Specifically, I hated him from 2006 through 2009 when he was the quarterback for the Florida Gators. I hated him far less when Alabama finally stuffed Florida in the SEC championship game at the end of the 2009 season and he sat on the sidelines bawling like a baby. At first I laughed – “Ha, ha — how do you like it now, Timmy? Why don’t you go up in the stands and hold Mommy and Daddy’s hands?” I even clipped a newspaper photo of him, tears streaming down his cheeks, and hung it on my office wall.

The pros, however, are like the Army – my team right or wrong. If you want your team to win, you root for the guys who wear your uniform, regardless of where they come from or where they went to school. But nothing Tebow does on the football field or off it is going to make me feel any different about abortion — no matter how strongly he comes out against it. And if anything he does makes you feel different about abortion, then you’re neither a believer nor a bigot, you’re an idiot. And I wonder how much preaching Denver fans are going to stand for when the team loses three or four in a row.

I do admire him for his public stance on compensating college athletes for the money they generate for their schools, which reveals more guts than some of his coaches have shown. And I like that Tebow puts his money where his mouth is, helping his parents, who are missionaries, establish and maintain an orphanage in the Philippines.

But a role model? No way. Many of his values are not mine, and I wish he would understand that proclaiming them publicly could create divisions on his own team. As former Denver quarterback Jake Plummer told a reporter, “I wish he’d just shut up after a game and go hug his teammates.” A much stronger reaction occurred just before Tebow’s rookie season at an NFL scouting combine. Tebow suggested the group pray; a player suggested that he “shut the fuck up.”

The suggestion that Tebow tone it down in public seems to anger people like Todd Starnes, who asks rhetorically, “Should Christians enter restaurants through the back door and use separate drinking fountains?”

No, but when they’re in public they might follow the advice of Jesus in Matthew 6:5-7, who instructed that “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret …”

Personally, I want my quarterback to have more of a Joe Namath-type swagger and a little less humility. But in the NFL, God is on the side of the best quarterback.

Cue the Hallelujah choir. At the last possible second, just before he is knocked out of bounds, Tebow spots a receiver hanging around just 10 yards away and dumps the ball to him The play-by-play announcer is suddenly hollering in excitement: TOUCHDOWN BRONCOS! A few minutes later, as the camera catches Tebow on the sideline, his eyes blazing with the righteous intensity of an Old Testament avenging angel, the color analyst, former Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick, finally surrenders.

“OK,” he says. “I’m in.”

Meaning: I have seen the light and realized the error of my Tim Tebow-unbelieving ways. The truth can no longer be denied: Tim Tebow’s spiral might suck, and his run-first style might constitute pro football anathema. But so what? This soft-voiced son of a preacherman from North Florida is a winner.

To those of us who have been watching him since the fall of 2006, when he scored a touchdown on his first-ever running play as a backup freshman quarterback at the University of Florida, the sight of Tebow performing remarkable feats on the football field is not surprising. But what we couldn’t have imagined five years ago is how the entire nation would one day convulse into a crazed debate over the deeper meaning of both his religious faith and his weird throwing motion. This is such a great country: A guy wins a few games in the NFL running an offense that Neanderthals would consider old-fashioned, while engaging in over-the-top public displays of Jesus affection, and the country collapses into a collective hissy-fit of thermonuclear proportions.

Of course, that first game against Southern Mississippi was before the Heisman trophy, the two national championships, the circumcisions of Filipino babies, the kooky (but surprisingly tasteful) anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl and, most recently, his astonishing, dare we say miraculous, success as the field general of the Denver Broncos — his five-game winning streak, amazing fourth quarter comebacks, and transformation of a 1-4 team going nowhere into a legitimate playoff contender. Tim Tebow appears to be a genuinely nice guy, but it’s no accident that polarization follows in his herky-jerk footsteps. If you mess with both abortion and the pro football passing game, people are going to be upset.

But you know what, that’s OK. Because I have my own gospel to preach about Tim Tebow. It’s alright to love him and to hate him. We can thrill to his gridiron exploits and at the same time be annoyed by his over-the-top, incessant declarations of faith. In fact it might even be healthy for us, as a society, to embrace the contradictions. Maybe this country be better off if everyone, left or right, evangelical or atheist, pocket passer or option quarterback, occasionally found room in their hearts to cheer for those who are different. The world never makes complete sense, we’re all scramblers in an endless busted play. Why not enjoy the mess?

***

If Tim Tebow had lost the six out of the seven games he’d started this year, the nation would likely have already moved on to other passions. There are only so many times that the naysayers who are convinced Tebow doesn’t have the necessary skill set required for modern quarterback success can repeat their I-told-you-sos before we just don’t need to hear it any more. But Tebow’s uncanny ability to keep winning has kept the pot boiling. Everybody feels compelled to have their say –  the opinion pieces are slamming in from multiple angles, like safeties and linebackers on an-all out blitz. And what makes Tebow such a fascinating character is that the argument about how he plays has gotten inextricably caught up with an argument about how he believes.

Listen, for example, to William Bennett, the conservative pundit, gambling addict and author of “The Book of Virtues.” The many “commentators, critics and even fellow athletes” who “mock and deride him and hope that he fails” are doing so, says Bennett, because they are bothered “by his faith, character and conviction.” Tebow-haters, in other words hate God, kittens and apple pie. (Another word for such people: “liberals.”)

And then there’s the take of Chuck Klosterman — author of “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” and our culture’s leading authority on the history and meaning of MTV’s pioneering “Real World” series. Klosterman argues that Tebow is discomfiting because “he makes blind faith a viable option.”

His faith in God, his followers’ faith in him — it all defies modernity. This is why people care so much. He is making people wonder if they should try to believe things they don’t actually believe.

In other words we don’t hate Tebow because he has faith, we hate him because we’re afraid his won-loss record might convert us. That’s scary! It’s not enough that he has setting back the game of football 50 years, according to the purists, but he also can change water into wine?! Hide the children, Tebow’s coming, and he’s bringing the Lord with him. We can shrug off the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door, but woe betide the man who tries to deny Tebow. Did you see what he did to that safety?

But wait — why I am using the word “we?” I certainly don’t hate Tim Tebow. I love the guy! And I avow this love even as I struggle for dear life to hold on to my credentials as a card-carrying liberal skeptic. Sure, if Tim Tebow was running for political office, I find it very difficult to imagine that I would vote for him. But his relationship with his Savior doesn’t prevent me from thrilling to the passion and competitive intensity he brings to the game of football. When Billick exclaimed at the look in Tebow’s eyes, he was just seeing something that Gator fans have known since day one — behind all the pretty talk about God, Tebow is flat-out ferocious. I want him in my foxhole.

At this juncture, it’s probably wise to include a disclaimer. If Tim Tebow’s college career had been spent at Florida State instead of Florida, it’s entirely possible that I might be leading the charge against him, that I’d be ranting and hollering about his holier-than-thou preening and his apparent inability to run a conventional pro-style offense.

But I have deep roots in the city of Gainesville, where the Florida Gators play. I went to high school there, and my mother and stepfather have had season’s tickets to Gator games for decades. I’m a big fan. And when you are a fan and someone comes along and helps deliver two national championships while breaking a ton of longstanding records — well, it’s hard not to get attached, and easy to ignore the things you might not like.

And call me a hypocrite, but as a longtime Gator fan, I was schooled in how to let protestations of faith slide off my back while Tebow was still in elementary school. A decade before Tim Tebow started knocking would-be tacklers out of their cleats, a young man named Danny Wuerffel marked each of his many, many touchdowns with a pious clasping of his hands in prayer. I didn’t groove on it then and I don’t groove on it when Tebow does similar things now. Maybe it’s the New England Unitarian in me, but I’d just prefer it if people kept their religious beliefs to themselves.

But I don’t care who you worship on bended knee if you can score touchdowns in the Southeastern Conference. I’m tolerant that way. And so, when push comes to shove on the line of scrimmage, is the NFL. Or it will be, if Tebow keeps winning.

***

Tebow’s head-first plunge into the abortion issue makes him fair game for inclusion in the culture wars, but it would be a shame if we allowed our political beliefs to obscure how fun it is to watch Tebow make plays. He might not look pretty, and he might not throw a tight spiral, but you’d be a fool if you didn’t want him on your team in a close game when time is running out. You won’t ever see fear in Tebow’s eyes. You won’t ever see him give up. Quite the opposite, when the pressure intensifies, Tebow gets better.

Which is why Brian Billick’s on-air pledge of Tebow allegiance was particularly meaningful. Billick’s a very smart guy who knows the pro game backwards and forwards and can dissect it with precision. He was one of the broadcasters on the Gators 2009 trip to the Sugar Bowl and during that game he made a convincing case that Tebow’s ungainly throwing motion, which looks more like the roundhouse windup of a professional bowler than it does your average pro gunslinger’s polished delivery, would be a disaster in the pros.

Billick was not alone in this analysis. Pro scouts and draft watchers and ESPN analysts had been doubting Tebow’s suitability for the pro game for years, and their criticism intensified after the quarterback blundered his way through an apparently awful training camp before this season. There was a surprisingly personal level of animosity expressed from some parts — best captured in the infamous tweet from analyst Merril Hoge: “It’s embarrassing to think the broncos could win with tebow.”

But it’s a mistake to induct Hoge into the culture wars, to claim, as William Bennett does, that all the anti-Tebow mockery is connected to Tebow’s faith. There are bigger things at stake here than God — there’s the far more important issue of whether the sanctity of modern professional football will survive Tebow’s barbarian assault. The real miracle of Tebow is how multifaceted his polarization powers are. Bennett can see only the political/religious side. But within the game of football, Tebow’s protestations of faith in Jesus are beside the point. Far more alarming is the fact that Tebow’s just-win-baby ad hoc improvisation is letting the air out of pro football’s blimp of self-importance.

In pro basketball or baseball, you rarely hear a coach or manager described as a “genius.” But geniuses are a dime a dozen in the NFL. You need to be a genius to be able to figure out the complexity of the modern NFL game, the constantly shifting defenses, the myriad offensive sets. It’s a chess game, we keep hearing, only the pieces weigh 300 pounds and are constantly hurtling into each other at high speeds.

They don’t call quarterbacks “field generals” for nothing. The modern quarterback is supposed to be able to instantly recognize what defenses are planning and execute a plan of attack that will exploit the inevitable weakness — and these plans generally are only supposed to be effective if you are capable of rifling a ball 20 yards with a perfect spiral to the spot where only your intended receiver can catch it.

But Tim Tebow has been winning while captaining a run-oriented offense that features only the safest of passes — one popular putdown is that Tebow’s offense would barely qualify for your typical Friday night high school showdown. And yet, somehow, it works. Turns out, it is embarrassing to think that the Broncos could win with Tebow, but the people being humiliated are not Denver’s fans. It’s the high apostles of the NFL, suddenly revealed to be without any clothes.

Some of his detractors, like Billick, are now recognizing where credit is due and jumping on the bandwagon. Others are falling back into teeth-grinding defensive stances. Merril Hoge now says he never intended to say the Denver Broncos couldn’t win at all with Tebow, what he really meant was that they’d never win a Super Bowl with Tim Tebow.

Maybe that’s true. It’s also entirely possible that Tim Tebow will crash and burn; that NFL defensive coordinators will finally figure out how to stop him. He might never win five games in a row again, and could easily end up just another NFL journeyman, rarely, if ever, smelling the playoffs. Come the AFC championship game, God may decide that he prefers the immaculate spiral of Tom Brady. There are certainly no guarantees.

But sports are most exciting in the moment, and right now, you will have a hard time finding better entertainment for your sports-watching dollar than Tebow with the ball in the last two minutes of a tied game. And the scorn coming down from on high has a way of bringing even unbelievers into the fold. Because, while Americans may not agree on matters of faith and politics, we do tend to like a good David vs. Goliath showdown, and the story of a quarterback who supposedly can’t play making the hierarchy of a pro football look like a bunch of nattering fools is a most excellent adventure. It seems crazy to think of someone like Tebow, with all his college accomplishments, as the underdog, but in this context, that’s exactly what he is.

He might not have the skills of a Tom Brady or a Drew Brees or an Aaron Rodgers, but he has the one thing no successful underdog ever lacks: the will to overcome. And that’s inspiring — because while the vast majority of us can’t throw a pass like Drew Brees, we all, at least theoretically, can conjure up the will to achieve something we feel passionate about.

I don’t believe that Jesus saves, but I do believe in Tebow. If that’s an irresolvable contradiction, well so be it. The world is full of irresolvable contradictions, and the sooner we accept that, the more content we will be.