Tim Tebow fantasy owners explain themselves

When the season started, some eagle-eyed folks noticed that more fantasy football owners on ESPN had drafted former player-turned-college football analyst Tim Tebow than Jaguars current starting quarterback Chad Henne. Since the season started that number has leveled out, each player now owned in 0.7 percent of leagues, according to ESPN’s statistics.

It’s remarkable that owners would draft and keep a player who hasn’t seen NFL action in almost two years, so I set out to find out who these people are and what they were thinking. My appeal to the masses netted numerous responses within minutes, the first from Charles Harding, who told me that an owner in a league with his fraternity brothers drafted Tebow.

“The opinion of this guy going in was that he is a total boner who tries to do funny stuff but it just comes off as really dumb,” he said, via email. “But there was a serious discussion about whether Tebow was available or not so maybe the whole league is full of idiots.”

Maybe. Or maybe Harding’s “idiot” friend had a good reason for it, like Tyler Joynt, who drafted Tebow for his Florida fan in-laws.

“I drafted him because my mother-in-law is a huge Florida fan and sincerely asked if I was going to draft him,” said the 25-year-old husband of the year from Alabama (Roll Tide). “I thought the idea of him was hilarious, and then Aaron Hernandez popped up on the tight end list.”

He grabbed Hernandez too and drafted Ray Rice because this is fantasy football and nothing matters.

Joynt wasn’t the only person who drafted Tebow for family reasons.

“He’s on my team every year,” explained 22-year-old Griffin Queen. “My sister is actually a UF grad and she was at UF for two of the years that Tebow was there, so I became a fan of him. Even though he’s not the best quarterback -- everybody knows that -- those games were so much fun. He’s a remarkable dude and has a really great, upstanding moral character. And it’s kind of a running joke that I have a man-crush on Tebow. Whatever, I’m fine with it.”

Queen is so serious about having Tebow on his fantasy team that his league mates spent most of this year’s draft threatening to draft Tebow themselves in order to force a trade.

“People were saying that they were going to do it so that I would have to trade them a good player,” said Queen, who has pledged not to drop him, even if it means he has to start an injured player. “I was like, ‘I will pay you money to not take him. Please don’t do this to me. I don’t want to have to trade a good player to get him back, but I will.’ I think they respected the dedication.”

He knows that when this item gets posted he’ll get made fun of, but Queen says he doesn’t mind.

“If you’re not laughing at yourself, who can you laugh at?”

Well, how about Joe Schule, who not only drafted Tebow in his auction league, but tried to buy Aaron Hernandez too and got outbid.

“He was actually the sixth person I got, but I only got him for a dollar,” Schule said, of Tebow. “One of my buddies, after I put up Tim Tebow, put up Aaron Hernandez as a joke and then I bid $2 on him, and then someone else came in and bid $3 on him.”

You read that right. In Schule’s league, a player on trial for murder is worth more than Tim Tebow. So using that metric, combined with what we already know and applying it to basic and totally reasonable math, Aaron Hernandez > Tim Tebow > Chad Henne.

Another responder, Trae Camp, told me that he drafts Tebow every year as part of a long-running joke among his college friends from Mississippi State University.

“I’ll probably keep him,” said Camp, when I asked if he would eventually drop Tebow for an active player. “We play in an ESPN league we’ve had for seven years now. It’s 16 members deep, so there are not many helpful players left available, so I’ll keep him unless I have numerous injuries and desperately need actual third-string players.”

This Tebow dedication is only possible because ESPN made its analyst and prized subject an available player in its draft client. Whether by accident, sense of humor or as a result of ESPN’s own Tebow obsession, I don’t know, but should it choose to remove him from the list next year, it would end quite a few long-running jokes and leave at least one owner devastated.

“I’m going to be very disappointed,” said Queen sadly.

Me too, friend. Me too.