Tim Tebow’s former coach calls out NFL
The New York Jets don’t think Tim Tebow has a future with them, and certainly there are a number of other teams and coaches who feel the same way.
But Tebow has picked up plenty of believers along his career path, and there’s at least one who still thinks the 25-year-old lefty has a future in the NFL.
“The day I met him and saw him throw the first time—even sitting down for the first time and talking ball with him—I knew he was going to be an NFL football player—at quarterback,” said Ken Fasnacht, Tebow’s offensive coordinator at Nease High School and now the offensive coordinator at Southern Oregon, which led the NAIA in scoring (52.8 points) and total offense (642.0) in 2012. “I still think he should be a quarterback in the NFL. I just think that league is spoiled, doesn’t coach those guys. If he’s not ready to go, if they have to work on something, they don’t want to fix anything. They want him already ready to go. I knew he’d play quarterback in the NFL and I still think he can.”
Fasnacht and then-Nease head coach Craig Howard (now head coach at Southern Oregon) put the St. Augustine, Fla., high school on the map with their high-powered, throw-it-all-over-the-field offense led by Tebow.
Tebow arrived at Nease as a sophomore, and Fasnacht said it was obvious from Day 1 that he was a different sort of athlete.
Tim Tebow was a prep star as a quarterback in Florida. (AP Photo)“The kid wanted to be a quarterback since he was a little kid,” said Fasnacht in an interview prior to Tebow's release Monday. “Football was not his sport—playing quarterback was his sport. He was a very focused individual.”
Tebow led the Panthers to their first state title in 2005 as a senior. In three seasons at Nease, he threw for 9,810 yards and 95 touchdowns and ran for 3,186 yards and another 62 scores.
Fasnacht says those numbers and those wins didn’t come with luck. He recalled the first time he watched Tebow throw before spring practice of his sophomore season in 2003.
“He’s out throwing balls, having fun, and we have nine kids that think they can play receiver at that point and none of them are very good at the time,” Fasnacht said. “He’s throwing balls, and I remember that I don’t think I saw a kid catch one because they were coming in so hard, zipping in like a real quarterback, bouncing off kids’ chests. I told coach that we needed to find some receivers because this guy can throw it.”
And despite being released Monday by the Jets and traded by the Broncos to make room for Peyton Manning prior to last season, Fasnacht doesn’t think that’s it for him.
“They talk about an elongated throwing motion, and he has a little bit of a pitcher’s delivery, but he didn’t throw like that in high school,” he said. “He was a very tight delivery guy. I think part of it is, because (Florida) had an offense where he was such a good runner. He threw for a lot of yards at Florida, too. ... Percy Harvin caught a lot of touchdown passes. All those guys caught balls in that system. But I think you let bad habits form because he was such a runner and nobody paid attention to coaching him on the passing game and I still think it’s that way in the NFL.
"Part of it, too, is they over-coach it. Leave his throwing motion alone—just make him go through reads and progressions, throw the ball on time and some of that stuff fixes itself. There’s so much attention brought to it, that it’s even in his head now. I think if one guy just said, ‘Timmy, you’re going to be a great quarterback,’ he’d be fine.”