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Tim Tebow is a football player, technically, but he’s also been positioned as a religious idol icon symbol person because of his outspoken Evangelical beliefs. When you remove his public persona from it all, it seems likely that most people are indifferent to his signing by the Eagles, since he may never hit the field in midnight green. But since you can’t really separate Tebow the quarterback from Tebow the person, there’s a divide among those who support the move.

According to a preview of a larger poll from Public Policy Polling, 77% of Republican Eagles fans favored the move, while only 36% of Democrat Eagles fans shared their feelings. It makes sense, since in 2011 polls showed that 70% of Evangelicals favor the GOP, and those Evangelicals (or just the “religious right”) would be happy to have an outspoken believer in the NFL. On the other side, 61% of religiously unaffiliated voters identify as Democrats, and may be throwing their own “get it out of my face, Timmy” bias against Tebow.

This has been a very long explanation of something that was already fairly obvious: In America, we politicize everything. And that the offseason is very long.