More fodder for the Tim Tebow groupies who think he's gotten a rotten deal compared with Michael Sam: Tebow has not been invited to the March 22 Veteran Combine, while Michael Sam has.
The NFL released the list of invitees to the inaugural event in Phoenix and the openly gay Sam, as we reported last week, will be there. Tebow, the openly very Christian former Broncos, Jets and Patriots quarterback, will not. The list can still be adjusted, so there is a chance this could change.
As I wrote last year, there have been a fair amount of articles and expressions on social media that goes something like this opening from an Orlando Sentinel column: "It's heavenly to celebrate homosexuality, but you'll catch hell for celebrating Christianity."
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Type in "Tim Tebow Michael Sam" into Google and you get 420,000 matches, many of them articles decrying this alleged double standard. It was B.S. then and it's B.S. now. Tebow actually played in the NFL and had chances to stick on three rosters, so his religion clearly did not hold him back. Sam was drafted and then cut by the Rams and later cut by the Dallas Cowboys from their practice squad. One can argue — as Cyd did here — that his being gay was a factor in not having an NFL job.
Sam and Tebow have never been rivals. Instead, they have been stand-ins for larger cultural forces at work in society. As gay marriage has become legal much more accepted, those opposed to such progress paint themselves as victims of religious discrimination. They even extend this to the football field, even though it's an absurd comparison.
