Tebowmania Takes Jets Camp by Storm

It's no surprise that Tebow dominated the first weekend of Jets training camp

The good news is that none of Tim Tebow's Jets teammates seem to mind the amount of attention that he's getting from the media.

On some teams, the fact that a backup quarterback gets treated with fawning attention usually reserved for superstars and starlets would be a fairly big problem. The Jets, though, have treated Tebow making the cover of tabloids for running through the rain shirtless as the completely ridiculous and absurd happening that it is.

Bart Scott joked that it was holy water, the team's quarterbacks razzed Tebow for wearing a shirt to their position meeting and Tebow himself proved that he's not fazed by all the attention by promptly going topless for the rest of the meeting. These kinds of things have led to issues with other teams in various sports in the past, but it does seem that the Jets' experience in the center ring of many a media circus has left them with the proper attitude about all the nonsense.

So that's the good news. The bad news comes in a couple of different forms.

The first is that Tebow's play has been just as bad as everyone feared when they started thinking about handing him the reins to the offense. These reports are tempered by the fact that the Jets haven't been running any of the specialized running packages designed for Tebow, but things aren't really headed in a spectacular direction when you're tempering bad vibes about your quarterback by pointing out that throwing isn't his strong suit.

The second bit of bad news is that all of the fun everyone is having with the attention paid to Tebow serves to highlight Mark Sanchez's shaky place on the team. Most teams in the league treat their starting quarterback with a deference that borders on reverence whether their name is Aaron Rodgers, Matt Schaub or Carson Palmer.

Sanchez doesn't get that treatment and the nature of the relationship with Tebow is such that Tebow's the guy set up to succeed because he is always going to loom as an option when Sanchez falters. That is often the case with backup quarterbacks, but it is much less rare to see a case where the team's starter is going to already be giving time to the backup during every game.

It's unlikely, then, that all the good feelings about life around the Jets camp continue once the newness of camp wears off and the realities of this year's offense take center stage. We'll set the over/under at the second preseason game as the point when shirtless scampers in the rain stop being funny and start getting annoying.

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Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.

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