Israel Gutierrez

MIAMI -- No one can say with certainty when it happened, but Tim Tebow appears to have taken over our world.

Perhaps the Dolphins helped catapult him from interesting topic to unavoidable subject by allowing him to bring the Broncos back from 15 points down, but the former Heisman Trophy winner has morphed from a great college player and questionable first-round pick all the way to the most intriguing conversation in all of football.

He has turned a simple pose into a worldwide trend. He has turned the iconic former champion quarterback John Elway into a divisive figure in his own home city. He has turned the once-wretched Denver Broncos into a serious playoff threat and probably the most entertaining low-scoring team in NFL history. And he has created a firestorm because there is one simple question no one seems to have a convincing enough answer to: "Can Tebow win regularly, and at a high level, as an NFL quarterback?"

If it's NBA basketball you want, it's easy to side with the owners in this lockout that's a few days away from threatening the start of the season.

It's easy to argue that basketball superstars are placing themselves above the game, and that permanent bench players are making too many millions already, and that these players have hardly any ground to stand on when the NFL has everyone's attention for the next four months anyway.

It's easy to say that a league that's suffering actual losses, at least as far as we're allowed to see, is well within its own right to restructure its economic model, and that players bickering over how much money they deserve need to come down to earth and take significant pay cuts just like so many others in this country have over the past several years.

MIAMI -- It wasn't planned this way.

The Florida Panthers didn't wait for the NBA and NFL to be in simultaneous lockouts to steal the South Florida sports spotlight with an historic player haul.

The Panthers didn't assume their "Seeing Red" billboards would be getting the most attention down here, where hockey never seems to be in season even when it's in season, because two of the other pro sports were in hiatus and the third was in a complete freefall.

DALLAS -- Walking into the J.C. Phelps Recreation Center, Chris Bosh is about 20 miles from the childhood home where he used to pick pecans from his yard for hours at a time, both as a chore and to turn a profit.