This is not about God. It’s about a man’s ability to throw an oblong sphere through the air. That’s it.

I’ve decided to add the “Bottom line: Tebow is a winner” refrain to my “I told you so” calendar. It’s set to fire off at the midpoint of next year’s NFL season.

Tebow’s situation is a strange one.

He is completing just 44% of his passes and has thrown 7 touchdowns in 8 games this season.

He has yet to throw for 200 yards in a game all season.

He is 4-2 as a starter, but he has beaten teams with a combined record of 16 wins and 21 losses.

In fact, none of the teams that he has beaten has a winning record.

Is Tebow a winner on the NFL level?

If winning a handful of games against subpar teams while performing exceedingly poorly by NFL passing standards is winning, then yes, Tebow is a winner.

I suspect that time will prove, however, that he is not.

In last night’s game against the Jets, Tebow had one well-timed scoring drive at the end of the game, helping to propel the Broncos to a win. But had Mark Sanchez not thrown an interception that resulted in a touchdown earlier in the game, Tebow would have never had the chance to win the game.

In 56 minutes, the Broncos had managed to score just 3 points, and those points had come on a 50 yard field goal.

I watched the game. The guy can’t throw the ball. Even on his final 95-yard drive to the winning score, he only completed 2 of 5 passes. Almost all the yardage came on the ground, and while Tebow ran for a good portion of that yardage, there are running backs who could do the same.

You’d hope your quarterback could pass the ball a little.

With all that said, I have nothing against Tim Tebow. As long as he is not playing the Patriots, I have no problem rooting for him, as I was last night.

last night, I loved the guy.

But at this point in his career, all empirical evidence indicates that the guy is a below-average quarterback who is not effective at passing the ball.

But that’s not the strange part of the Tim Tebow situation.

This is:

Tebow is a very religious man. He can be seen praying on the sidelines during the game and thanking God after scoring drives. He is vocal about his spirituality and has been embraced by the Christian community.

As a result, there has been a almost unprecedented backlash against anyone who claims that Tim Tebow is a subpar quarterback. Even sportscasters and former NFL players have been treading carefully when discussing Tim Tebow in the media in fear of the reaction they may receive after criticizing this man’s play on the field.

Some of the greatest players in the game are criticized on a weekly basis for subpar play. During their recent two game losing streak, three-time Super Bowl champion and future Hall of Famer Tom Brady was criticized for his erratic play. He had thrown an excessive number of interceptions and failed to get the ball downfield on a consistent basis.

He’s one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history, and yet he was criticized by many in the media.

Yet there was no backlash. There were no Twitter bombs or angry calls into sports radio shows claiming that broadcasters “wanted Brady to fail”.  Facebook was not alight with defenders claiming that anyone who did not believe in the man’s skills was a hater.

Yet Tebow has engendered responses like this repeatedly.

Criticize Tim Tebow’s quarterback play and you you had better duck.

There’s nothing wrong with liking Tim Tebow. There’s nothing wrong with believing that he will have a long and prosperous NFL career.

But there is also nothing wrong with someone looking at the data and determining that Tebow is probably a subpar quarterback who is beating subpar teams and has little future in the NFl.

It has nothing to do with faith or religion or mean-spiritedness.

It’s just football.

Could we please keep God out of it?

We’ll see what happens when my “I told you so” calendar fires off next year, reminding me to tell those Tim Tebow supporters that their popular “Bottom line: Tim Tebow is a winner” refrain proved less than accurate, at least on the NFL level.

Perhaps I will be eating my words. But I suspect not.