Tim Tebow couldn't do anything against Iowa

Of course, Tim Tebow never played against Iowa. I just put his name in a headline to get some cheap Tebow heat.

I'll pause right here to admit this is a silly post. It's a sports blog, folks, not the op/ed section of the Washington Post.

Tebow's Florida career began in the 2006 season, the season after the Gators beat Iowa 31-24 in the Outback Bowl.

But to desperately try to make this post relevant to the NFL's top individual newsmaker of the season ...

In the Orange Bowl two seasons ago, Iowa faced a Georgia Tech receiver named Demaryius Thomas who came into that game with 46 receptions for 1,154 yards and eight touchdowns. Thomas never caught a pass, and Tech completed just two of nine throws in its 24-14 loss to the Hawkeyes.

Thomas, a junior, entered the 2010 NFL draft and was the 22nd player taken, to the Denver Broncos.

Thomas caught a touchdown pass from Tebow last Sunday to help enable the Broncos to rally from a 10-0 deficit late in the game and end up beating the Chicago Bears in overtime.

Tim Tebow. I just had to type the name again to get a little more cheap heat. What's the matter with me?

Anyhow, here's the pre-Orange Bowl column I wrote about Thomas:

DAVIE, Fla. -- He weighs 229 pounds. He spends 90 percent of his time blocking and touches the ball less than four times a game.

So is Georgia Tech wide receiver Demaryius "Bay-Bay" Thomas a grunt. Oh, no, no, no. He is a game-breaker, someone with freaky-good receiving statistics for a wideout in a triple-option offense that has passed less often this season than all but two FBS teams.

Of all the fear-inducing weapons in Paul Johnson's fear-inducing offense, Thomas may be the most lethal. At 6-foot-3 and those 229 pounds, he can't hide on a football field. Yet he can.

Tech can run the ball on play after play, and often does. But if a defense gets lulled into the ground-game hypnosis, there goes a bomb from quarterback Josh Nesbitt to Thomas .

"I love that," Nesbitt said Thursday after the Yellow Jackets' practice at Nova Southeastern University as they prepared to face Iowa in the Jan. 5 Orange Bowl. "I put it up in the air and he'll come down with it."

Thomas ' numbers are crazy given this offense. He is 15th in the nation and first in the Atlantic Coast Conference in receiving yards per game with 88.8 but has no more than half as many catches as any of the top 14 receiving producers.

But he averages a whopping 25.1 yards for his 46 receptions. Nine were good for 50 yards or more.

The football-as-war parallels are overused, but this is an attack that grinds you down with its tanks, then wipes you out with its bombs.

To think that Thomas was ready to check out of Tech when Johnson arrived from Navy to replace the fired Chan Gailey two years ago.

"I was hearing a lot of stuff about how Coach Johnson ran the ball 90 percent of the time," Thomas said. "I actually sat down with my parents and thought about transferring. The coach said 'Just give it a chance.' I stayed and had more catches than my first year."

Thomas has 46 of the Jackets' 76 receptions this season. In three games, he had all of his team's catches. No one else on the team has more than nine receptions.

Defenses know the junior is the bomb, so to speak, but that doesn't mean they defuse him. He had plays of 70 yards or more in the last three games, including an ACC title-game win over Clemson.

But the big man does block, too. He has no choice in that offense.

"I actually like it," Thomas said. "It helps sometimes with my receiving, because they think I'm going to block."

It's crazy. Thomas is a Georgian, so going to Georgia Tech made sense. Especially since he was going to a program that had developed Calvin Johnson, one of college football's best receivers of the decade, maybe ever.

Johnson's last year at Tech was 2006 when Thomas was a red-shirt. Thomas began asserting himself in games as a second-year freshman, in came the triple-option, and Thomas only got better.

He is a one-man sales pitch for Paul Johnson when it comes to pursuing prep wideouts.

"It's like we tell wide receiver recruits," Johnson said this season. "People say 'Hey, you don't want to go to that offense.' If you're a great player, that's a great offense to be in. Can you imagine what Calvin Johnson could have done with one guy on him on play-action? That's really what Bay-Bay has done."

Whichever Hawkeye defensive back is covering Thomas will surely have it drilled in his head that this is no blocker, no matter how much time he spends doing it.

This is a receiver who must be contained if Iowa is to win this game.