It wasd hardly Joe Montana looking up into the Joe Robbie Stadium stands with three minutes left in Super Bowl XXIII and asking tackle Harris Barton during a television timeout before throwing the game-winning touchdown pass to John Taylor that beat the Bengals: “Isn’t that John Candy?”
No, it was merely a preseason opener on the road, but it provides a glimpse into what makes Tim Tebow tick, how he leads and why others follow.
“Oh he’s fun,” Joe McKnight said. “He just wanted everybody to have fun. We were in the huddle dancing around.
“Tebow even sang us a song today,” McKnight said, smiling. “I forgot the song,” he added.
Now, if all you had to do was sing in the huddle to play quarterback in the NFL, we might be singing the praises today of Broadway Frank Sinatra. If you are off-key throwing the ball, your teammates will turn tone deaf on you in a hurry. Even if you’re singing “My Way.”
The jury still very much is out on Tebow, and on these Rex Ryan Jets. And it will be for quite some time. Maybe Tebow is the only quarterback who can take a team to the playoffs completing 46.2 percent of his passes. He will have to do considerably better than that to threaten Mark Sanchez, much less take any team, especially the Jets, to a Super Bowl.
His love of the game, the unbridled joy he has playing it, will drive him to at least try, at all costs. He never will surrender to the notion that it is a good idea for him to stand on the sidelines and watch someone else play quarterback. If he played baseball, he would sprint to first base on walks and we would call him Timmy Hustle.
He still will make esteemed practicioners of the art of throwing a football wince. He is a 250-pound improvisational bull whose snorting forays through the heart of unsuspecting defenses make him a veritable one-man Ground and Pound
His elusiveness and instincts in the pocket give him a leg up on Sanchez in this regard: When his offensive line protection breaks down, he can sense danger and escape it.
The problem is in today’s NFL, the odds of Grounding and Pounding your way to any Super Bowl are prohibitive. It is a quarterback-driven league, and until further notice, the Jets don’t have that quarterback to drive them all the way.
Though Tebow may be making strides with his footwork and accuracy, he is a long way away from making cornerbacks and defensive coordinators cower in fear. And Ryan’s obsession with Neanderthal offense leaves no margin for error: This is not a team built for catchup against Tom Brady. Or anyone else, for that matter.
He will score points with his teammates because, like Sanchez, he has learned it never is a good thing to throw a man under the bus. When someone asked him about rookie Stephen Hill’s first-down drop, here was Tebow: “He had already come up with a really nice catch. He’s someone that’s still working and getting better. He’s gonna be a great receiver. I just know he was really excited to make a big play and make Pacman [Jones] miss and try to take it to the house. … I have 100 percent [confidence] he’ll make that play every other time we go to him.”
Quarterbacks aside, offensive coordinator Tony Sparano has his work cut out for him. There is a blatant lack of proven playmaking explosiveness. There is no guarantee (right Rex?) that Shonn Greene can be the Ground and Pound bellcow. Wayne Hunter remains the right tackle.
Asked where the points will come from, Tebow said, “Obviously we didn’t do anything to game plan.” Very scary if they did. “Things’ll definitely change once the season gets here as far as game-planning, deciding, ‘Hey, this is where we’re going in with, this is how we’re planning on doing this,’ I think that changes a lot as well,” Tebow said.
Perhaps the Jets will dial up some Wildcat in the preseason?
“Whatever the coaches want to do,” Tebow said. “You know and they know that I’m gonna give my heart and soul to doing that as best I can. They’re a lot smarter than me, so I’ll let any decision like that. … I’ll let them make it.”
They better be Einsteins.
You don’t panic after the first preseason game. You draw no definitive conclusions. Santonio Holmes didn’t play. Jeremy Kerley didn’t play. Austin Howard won’t be the left tackle.
But none of it means there isn’t trouble in paradise. Tebow may have had that unsightly 18.2 QB rating against the Bengals, but he threw just eight passes, and had one dropped, and he did move the team better than Sanchez did in his two series.
The reality is the Jets will go as far as Sanchez can take them, with a little Wildcat help from Tebow and, Sanchez better hope, a lot of help from Ryan’s defense and Mike Westhoff’s special teams. You cannot run the ball effectively if you do not have the threat of the pass, and Tebow has a long road to hoe to close the throwing gap on Sanchez. And I haven’t even brought up the locker-room chemistry issues.
In the meantime, unless Sanchez suddenly can start making everyone around him better, this appears to be an offensively-challenged group. No one sings their way to a Super Bowl. Not even Tim Tebow.
steve.serby@nypost.com