Leave Him or Love Him, Tim Tebow Knows How to Disrupt

Many of us cling to the familiarity of the status quo, even when we don’t like its downside, and often have a hard time embracing game changers when they come along to upset it. That’s one of the reasons disruptors tend to be lightning rods for controversy. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, successful disruptors rarely evoke simple indifference.

Take, for example, Donald Trump. Whether one views him as a hero or a villain, it’s hard to deny his textbook disruptor’s path to the U.S. Presidency. Or Uber, challenging the primacy of deeply entrenched taxi transportation, offending cultural and business norms in myriad regions and countries, such as Denmark, from which Uber will soon withdraw, the result of laws passed essentially to prohibit it.

Tim Tebow is a serial disruptor and controversy trails after him like toilet paper on a shoe.

He challenges assumptions about both the appropriate and the possible. Fans hail him as a saint and detractors sneer at his practice of ‘Tebowing’ in religious devotion, and will call him a hypocrite, if ever his clean cut, service-oriented Christian image doesn’t seem to be 100% the genuine article. Aspiring to high character and falling short is sadly deemed a greater weakness than happily settling for low character to begin with. This is ironic at a time when some professional athletes are frequently embroiled in unsavory legal and ethical depredations on a more or less regular basis, displaying bad behavior and poor judgment in myriad objectionable ways.

Tebow is a disruptor if for no other reason than he is willing to proclaim aloud his determination to play on a different moral playing field than the many of his peers.

He was the first college football player to win the Heisman trophy as a sophomore. The Florida Gators won two national championships with him at the helm. As a high school athlete, he broke ground by competing as a home-schooled student, setting precedents and engaging in a trail-blazing effort to battle rules that restrict home-schoolers from participating in public school athletics in many jurisdictions around the country. He disrupts and disrupts again, with the controversial opinions always in tow.

Everyone knows that if Tebow had his way, he would be in the midst of a long and successful career as an NFL quarterback. But he is an unconventional quarterback for today’s NFL: a charismatic leader (desirable), but a sub-par passer (undesirable), and a strong and nimble runner. That sounds better than it is in fact—running quarterbacks are unpopular; professional football offenses are not built around this distinctive strength, and such quarterbacks are far more vulnerable to injury than those who stay securely in the pocket and pass or hand the ball off to a teammate, along with the target on the back that invites defenses to clobber them as they try to get downfield.

So after only a few seasons in the NFL, Tebow was bumped out. The high point of that brief career came during a remarkable run during his second season with the Denver Broncos, featuring multiple successive come-from-behind regular season victories and playoff performances that included career records in passing yardage and an NFL record of 31.6 yards per completed pass in a playoff game. That was the top of the learning curve for him as a professional football player, with the general consensus being that he simply didn’t possess the right combination of skills for his football trajectory to have risen very high or lasted very long. Whether he might eventually have done better will never be known; he had exhausted the opportunity afforded him in an extraordinarily competitive environment that doesn’t suffer slow learning curves gladly.

Some regard Tebow’s NFL career as a failure. Certainly, it was not what he hoped for, but, whether an experience is a success or a failure is, in many ways, a personal choice, a matter of perception. Many boys and young men aspire to the NFL—only a handful of these ever play a single down in a professional game. Tebow has a number of other initiatives always in the works. He has written a series of inspirational memoirs, backs them up with speaking engagements, and is well on his way to becoming a philanthropic legend.

His recent effort to reinvent a career as a professional athlete, this time in baseball, is the aspiration of a classic disruptor.

When Tebow announced his intention in the late summer of 2016, he hadn’t played baseball competitively since his junior year of high school—2005. Although he was a standout then, with interest expressed by at least one professional franchise, a dozen years have intervened. Nothing radiates the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately ethos like professional sports. Tebow will turn 30 this year, an ancient age for a rookie player. Nevertheless, in March, the New York Mets assigned him to their affiliate team in Columbia, S.C.

This is the low-end of the learning curve, no doubt. The team plays in the South Atlantic League, the Grapefruit League, and is famous mostly for the difficulty of its travel. Day-long bus rides to destinations in New Jersey, West Virginia and Kentucky are routine, a huge step back from the first class comforts of the NFL. But Tebow will be playing almost every day, practicing, honing his skills. It is impossible to say what may come of this opportunity over time.

The fact that he is willing to try—to do something that few attempt and even fewer succeed at doing—is a shining example of personal disruption at its finest.

“It's not about worrying about the level of competition and failing at it," he says. "This is a game mentally you have to be prepared to handle failure. If you fail 70 percent of the time, you're one of the best players in the game. But you have to be able to handle it mentally. It's not that you go into anything like this afraid of it, but also working and being excited about the challenge and the opportunity." 

How can I not root for that?

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Whitney Johnson is one of the world's leading management thinkers (Thinkers50), author of the critically acclaimed Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work and host of the Disrupt Yourself Podcast. You can sign up for her newsletter here.