Former ESPN personality Doug Gottlieb revealed that the network instructs their talent to talk about Tim Tebow as much as possible.

"I was told specifically, 'You can't talk enough Tebow,'" said Gottlieb on the Dan Patrick Show. "I would jokingly throw it into a segment. 'I gotta find 15 seconds here to talk about Tebow, all right let's move on and talk about Major League Baseball."

ESPN celebrated Tebow's birthday on-air a few weeks ago.

"Is it ridiculous how much you have to talk about Tebow? Yeah! But for whatever reason people can't get enough of that story, and they kind of stoke the fire—that's kind of what ESPN does."

Gottlieb said that ESPN creates news as much as it reports it.

"They've lost that credibility, a large portion of the credibility of covering news. I think that it's now: ‘What's trending?' Focus groups. You're trying to create things there. Bernie Fine story at Syracuse. Where's that? The New Orleans story with the Saints with Mickey Loomis? Where's that? Where are those stories? Those are big stories that you guys created. You were late on the Joe Paterno story. I think there's just a different mindset from what they're doing and how they're covering it. And they always fall back on ‘Well, Bob Ley covers the serious news stories.' SportsCenter should be covering sports, they should be covering the news. I think they created it with Tebow. And ESPN embarrassed themselves in spending a week out there at Jets camp."