Tebow's success due to production and protection, not magic

The Cold, Hard Football Facts are not just drinking the Tim Tebow Kool-Aid. We're mixing up big batches, grabbing innocent football fans off the street and pumping tubes of it down their throats -- much like French farmers force-feed geese to fatten the bird's liver and make tasty foie gras.

OK, that's overstating the case a bit. Foie gras is not so tasty.

But the Cold, Hard Football Fact of the matter is that there is a fundamentally solid statistical foundation beneath the success of the Denver Broncos with Tebow at quarterback.

Put most simply, Tebow consistently outplays the other team's quarterback, often by wide margins. This superior play is the No. 1 reason for Denver's sudden success -- now 5-1 with Tebow at QB this year after a dismal 1-4 start. But these superior performances seem lost on even the most knowledgeable football minds, like that of Broncos executive and Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway, for example.

Elway was asked last week on Denver sports radio 102.3 The Ticket if the Broncos were "any closer" to having its proverbial QB of the future on the field. He replied with a blunt "no" and added later, "we gotta get better in the passing game."

Tebow's career completion percentage of 47.1 in the NFL is well below modern standards. But completion percentage is only one small part of the story and not a very meaningful one at that.

So Elway and most observers seem to treat Tebow like a circus freak, a statistically deformed football curiosity who wins games in spite of his own feeble ability to pass the football.

You can win one or maybe two games in the NFL with some kind of fluky effort at QB. But the statistical length and breadth of NFL history shows that teams that win consistently do the same things well over and over -- and those same things begin and end with the quarterback position.

And the Broncos are no exception.

There's no doubt that Tebow's passing accuracy has been spotty at times. At the end of the day, though, he has consistently outplayed the other team's quarterbacks. The problem is that most analysts are limited in their ability to analyze and compare quarterbacks with anything more concrete than the old eye test. Or they look at stats that simply do not matter at the end of the day, such as passing yards, and can't figure out how Tebow is winning games.