Ex-New York Jets Coach: Tim Tebow is Average At Best
By Josh Hill
Tim Tebow is supposedly on his way out in New York, and now that the season is over for the Jets people are coming out of the woodwork to throw their matches into an already raging inferno. Most of the talk about the Jets during the season focused on Tim Tebow, and just because it’s over now doesn’t mean the talk has shifted anywhere else.
Mike Westhoff is set to retire this offseason after serving as an NFL special teams coach since 1986, but on his way out he’s letting the world know that the Tim Tebow situation in New York was as big of, if not a bigger mess than people already thought. Westhoff showed up on WQAM in Miami, where Westhoff served as special teams and tight ends coach from 1986 until 2000, to dish to host Joe Rose about the debacle he was a part of this season.
“It was a mess, it was an absolute mess. You can say whatever else you want, it was really a mess,” Westhoff told host Joe Rose. “I was very, very disappointed. As an NFL quarterback, he’s very limited in some things. And if you throw him right in the middle of a drop-back passing offense, he will look very, very average at best.”
However, while Westhoff has a not so kind critique of Tebow’s quarterbacking skills, he did say that he’s not a completely worthless NFL player, as some people have suggested. Westhoff said that lined up at the right position in the right set up, Tebow can be very effective.
The Jets failed to do that, and that’s the reason Westhoff says Tebow failed in New York and will likely fail anywhere else he tries to be a quarterback in the NFL.
“I was expecting him to line up as, really in a couple of roles,” Westhoff told Rose, a former himself was a versatile player for the Miami Dolphins back in the day. “I’ll give you an example: Some of the roles that you played, an H-back, a tight end, then all of a sudden there’s Jim Jensen who’s an H-back, a tight end, a halfback, a fullback and then he’s lined up at quarterback. That’s what I was expecting to see and we didn’t do it.”
Westhoff noted that he saw a distinct change in Tebow’s attitude once he was passed over in favor of Greg McElroy late in the season. Westhoff didn’t say directly that Tebow had told the Jets coaching stafff he wanted out of the Wildcat package, but he didn’t deny it either. Rather, Westhoff seemed to sympathize with Tebow over how he was treated.
“That was tough. You could see that was painful for him, so that kind of transitioned it,” Westhoff said. “But it was a shame to see him … you saw a demeanor change, you saw that swagger that got out of him a little bit and that was very disheartening to see that.”
Towards the end of the interview with Rose, Westhoff said that he had no hard feelings towards Tebow for being what he called a ‘distraction’ in New York this season.
“It was a distraction and a shame,” Westhoff said, “because that was a hard-working young man.”