What to do with Tebow? Hopefully a no-brainer for Meyer

Tim Tebow's scrambled brain will provide a window into Florida coach Urban Meyer's competitive soul.

The No. 1 Gators are off this week in the wake of the nasty concussion that sent Tebow to the hospital Saturday at Kentucky, but next week they play at No. 4 LSU -- a game that will shape the national title picture.

Which means Meyer faces a once-in-a-lifetime choice:

He can do the right thing for his team, his career, his legacy and his future earnings. He can play Tebow against LSU.

Or he can put the interests of Tebow ahead of all those things. Meyer can tell him it's too soon to play after suffering one of the more disturbing football concussions in years.

We'll learn about Meyer by learning how he goes about making this decision. Does he listen to the UF medical staff, who will be making nothing more than an educated guess when they most likely clear Tebow to play? Or does he listen to Tebow, who will surely want to get back onto the field whether he's ready or not? Or does Meyer listen to that little voice inside his own soul?

And what will that voice inside Meyer's soul say?

We're going to learn about Urban Meyer, all right.

You can guess what I think Meyer ought to do. I think he ought to prepare sophomore John Brantley to start. Because Tim Tebow can't play against LSU. Not so soon after that horrific collision.

You can go to Google and find a medical study that says Tebow can play after two weeks, but to come to that conclusion you'll have to ignore all the studies that say Tebow shouldn't play. See, medical experts can't agree on this topic, which means it's a judgment call -- which means we're going to learn a lot about Urban Meyer's value system. On the one hand, there's the national championship. On the other, there's Tim Tebow's future.

Don't quote to me studies that say Tebow can play. Don't waste your time, or mine. Every time an expert conducts a new study on concussions, it discovers that the old study and the previous experts were wrong -- that the recovery time after a concussion is longer than anyone used to think. And right now, experts think it takes at least two weeks to recover well enough from a concussion to resume normal activity.

Do you think playing quarterback in two weeks against the enormous and fast LSU defense qualifies as "normal activity"?

It does not. And furthermore, this particular concussion wasn't normal, not even in the realm of concussions, which are by definition bad, brain-jarring events. This was an abnormal, heinous-looking collision that started when Tebow was hit Saturday by Kentucky defensive end Taylor Wyndham on the jaw, helmet-to-helmet, probably hard enough to knock him woozy. We'll never know, because on his way down, the back of Tebow's head crashed into the knee of UF offensive lineman Marcus Gilbert. The 1-2 punch left Tebow looking like a boxer who had been knocked out, lying flat on his back with his arms reaching involuntarily upward. Minutes later he was vomiting on the sideline. It's a really bad concussion when the head has been hit so hard that the stomach is sick.

Soon Tebow was in an ambulance. Then a hospital. He stayed overnight.

None of that was normal, not even in the parlance of football concussions. This was a bad one. A really, really bad one.

Which means Urban Meyer has the chance, the obligation, to be a good man. He needs to ignore Tebow when Tebow says he's ready, because that's what players say. They say they're ready. And he needs to ignore the doctors when the doctors speculate Tebow is ready, because that's all doctors can do on concussion recovery. They speculate. And you know what? The health of a human being is too important to be left to speculation and wishful thinking.

Meyer would be doing a service not just to Tebow, but to every football player who suffers such a violent concussion going forward. What we need is a powerful precedent that a player, no matter how good he is, will not be rushed onto the field simply because he wants to play and because doctors think he's ready.

Urban Meyer has to decide if Tim Tebow will play after a concussion. (US Presswire)

Already we have a powerful precedent in the opposite direction, two years ago, when Oregon's Mike Bellotti hid behind the best guesses of doctors and the grit of his quarterback when he let Dennis Dixon play against Arizona with a torn ACL. Bellotti let Oregon's national title aspirations get the better of him, and when Dixon crumpled to the turf against Arizona with a blown-out knee -- hit by nobody -- Bellotti should have been fired on the spot.

That's where Meyer is today. He's Mike Bellotti, and Tebow is Dennis Dixon. Only, a head injury is much scarier than a torn ACL. There are two massive dangers from concussions: repeated concussions over time, like the nine suffered by former Jets receiver Al Toon or the 10 suffered by longtime NFL quarterback Stan Humphries. That's one massive danger.

The other danger is when a player suffers two in a short period of time, like former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson. He suffered two in a week in 2002, and soon he was unable to be comfortably outdoors for more than 15 minutes at a time. A report at the University of North Carolina found that football players who suffered one concussion were three times as likely as others to suffer a second concussion in the same season. And that second concussion, as Ted Johnson knows, can be a life-changer. Johnson suffers from a form of brain damage called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Look it up. Scary stuff.

This is where Meyer is today. He faces the biggest gamble of his coaching career. He has a team that could win a national title, which would be Meyer's third in five years. That would put him in some impressive company with, well, no one. Not in the BCS era, or any era, has a college football coach won three outright national titles in five years. It doesn't happen, but it will this season if the Gators do what they're supposed to do. And they're supposed to win this national title.

But that's with Tebow at quarterback.

Sit Tebow, and Meyer gambles that his team is good enough to beat LSU without him -- or that his team can lose to LSU and rebound strongly enough to reach the BCS title game with a loss.

That's one gamble. The other gamble is the long-term health and livelihood of Tim Tebow. Remember, the latest studies suggest two weeks to recover. But in Archives of Neurology, Dr. Lester Mayers recently advised that "a post-concussion [return-to-play] interval of at least four weeks is imperative."

Four weeks. And the LSU game is in two weeks. This should be a no-brainer, and I'm not talking about the effect another hit, so soon, could have on Tim Tebow's cranium. I'm talking about Urban Meyer's decision at quarterback for the LSU game.

Tebow will want to play, but we already know that. Tebow will need to be protected from himself.

What we're going to find out is this:

Does Tebow need to be protected from his head coach?