TWO BITS: Childress, Trestman supporting Tebow

By Adam Silverstein
April 5, 2010

1 » With new Washington Redskins quarterback Donovan McNabb now off the market and Brett Favre still deciding whether or not to return to the Minnesota Vikings, head coach Brad Childress has taken an interest in former Florida Gators QB Tim Tebow. Childress spoke with the Philadelphia Daily News on how much he believes in Tebow. “Aaron Rodgers was a complete re-do in his throwing motion from Cal, where people didn’t like his stroke and how the ball came out. And he’s doing fine,” Childress said. “Can it be done? It can be done. It’s just a matter of if you as a coach and you as a coaching staff feel like you can fix it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It only takes one person to like him, and they’re going to do everything in their power to make it right.”

2 » Now that his work with Tebow is done, Montreal Alouettes head coach Marc Trestman has come to the conclusion that the signal caller will indeed succeed in the NFL if given a chance, as he told The Morning Journal:

Read Trestman’s almost 500-word commendation of Tebow…after the break!

“I believe, in the right environment, Tim Tebow will figure this out. He doesn’t have explosive arm strength, but he has more than adequate arm strength to throw the ball in the NFL and make all the throws. I saw him do something totally different in seven or eight days. I can only imagine what he’s going to do in one year or two years, because he’s going to outwork everybody else and find a way to figure it out.

“[When Tebow asked,] I said I’d be more than happy to help. I didn’t see him play much, but I had heard his throwing motion was too long to get the ball out of his hand and that it would inhibit his ability to be a quarterback in the NFL. That made me wonder who was making the statements, because there are a lot of ways to throw the football. The most important thing for a quarterback to move the football team and complete passes accurately.

“I asked him he wanted me to do for him. What precipitated was a lot of classroom time. I spent maybe eight to 12 hours with him on the field if that working with his footwork, working under center and trying to accelerate every part of his footwork, hand position on the ball to deliver it quicker without so much of a windup. He has a beautiful throwing motion, but he was getting there in a longer amount of time than you would like to see based on the speed of the NFL game.

“I had a chance to not only be on the field with Tim, but to coach him, to say to him ‘take this type of footwork and do this with the ball.’ I never had to tell him more than once, and I really tried to grind him from a coaching standpoint and demand a lot of different things very quickly. He was able to assimilate it very fast.

“We spent some time slowing his motion down frame-by-frame comparing the way he throws it now to the way he did it two weeks earlier. There was a marked difference in the time of the release.

“If you’re a coach and you love coaching quarterbacks, you’d love the opportunity to develop Tim Tebow. That’s going to be the question. Guys are going to be asking themselves, ‘Wouldn’t I love to go to work every day and coach this kid? Is there enough there I can work with to make this happen in our system?’ When I go into that room with him he’s going to demand of me all the help I could give him, and he’s going to want me to demand of him everything he can give us. It’s a beautiful thing, because it all begins in the quarterback room.”

Photo Credits: Getty Images, CFL

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