After watching Florida win the national championship 24-14 over Oklahoma, followed afterward by Tim Tebow winning the most outstanding player award even though it clearly should have gone to Percy Harvin (who lost because he doesn't do circumcisions in the Philippines), I was instantly reminded of Toby Bailey.

Who?

For those of you old enough to remember, Toby Bailey was a sensational freshman guard on UCLA's 1995 NCAA championship basketball team. In the NCAA Final, he dropped 25 on the Arkansas Razorbacks and suddenly there were questions about would he go pro. At the time Bailey easily would have been a top 20 pick had he gone pro. People saw limitless potential, and a young kid who had just lit the NCAA Tournament on fire. Only problem was Bailey didn't go pro. At the time, it didn't seem to be a bad decision. Bailey would go back for another year or two, improve his game, prepare himself for the pro game. Except it didn't work out that way. Bailey never got better than he was his freshman year, and in fact, he got worse. He wound up staying at UCLA all 4 years, was drafted 45th in the 1998 NBA Draft, and played one season in the NBA. He bounced around Europe for years after that.

The point is, Bailey's peak was after he put up 25 on Arkansas, and he missed his opportunity to cash in. Had he left early he would have been a top 20 pick, made some decent coin, been given a longer time to develop, and likely would have at least stuck around the league for 3 or 4 years.

For Tebow, he's confronted with a similar predicament to the one Bailey faced.

Tebow wants to play quaterback in the NFL, which admittedly most people think he won't be very good at, including myself. Kirk Herbstreit even went so far as to say he'd take Pat White over Tebow in the draft if he was looking to draft a quarterback. That's not a compliment, by the way.

But the good news for Tebow is that he just won the national championship. And while NFL scouts and GMs are paid to be rational, thoughtful, and pragmatic people, they often aren't. They're human, like you and me, and they're also sometimes just ridiculously stupid (see: Millen, Matt). So to some GMs and scouts out there, or heck, even an owner, Tebow's shortcomings may suddenly seem less noticeable. They'll convince themselves that hey, "this kid is a winner" or "he's a great leader" or "man, that dude is great with a circumcision knife." Problem is, none of those things translate into a guy being able to thread the needle with a football at the pro level.

Because let's be honest here. Tebow is indeed a great college quarterback, but he has nothing you'd ever want in a pro quarterback. He takes an eternity to throw the ball, his release point is awkward, he's never thrown a tight spiral in his life, he runs an offense that consists of 8 plays that are never used in the pro game (a jump pass? WTF?), he relies on screen passes to Percy Harvin, he almost never gets past his first read, he stares down his receivers, and to top it all off, he plays in the same system that produced Alex Smith. There are more red flags in that last sentence than at a communist party rally.