January 13, 2012 07:09 PM UTC

KNUS' Kelley scores Tebow blurb, with Tebow-like scrappiness

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• by: Jason Salzman

“Hey everyone, this is Tim Tebow. And you’re listening to Kelley and Company on KNUS.”

You hear that on KNUS’ Kelley and Company many days, and you wonder, did Tebow mean to say, “KHOW.”

That’s Dan Caplis’ radio station, where Caplis promotes Tebow as if he were god.

Or did Tebow mean to say “KOA,” which is the radio station that almost certainly pays big bucks to have Tebow on the air Mondays.

So I called Steve Kelley, who recently returned from a three-day stint in Iowa, to find out how he scored the Tebow promotion, and it turns out Kelley landed Tebow himself to do the blurb for his show.

Around June, Kelley told me, Tebow was promoting his autobiography, Through My Eyes.

“Obviously he wants to get on some of the Christian stations speaking to his audience,” Kelley says. “I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”

“Salem is a Christian-owned group of stations, and so there’s already a built-in network on the Christian side,” Kelley told me. “And KNUS is on the secular side of Salem Communications.”

Tebow was scheduled to speak on Denver’s KRKS, owned by Salem, which bills itself as offering “life-changing Christian radio broadcasts.” (Salem is known as a right-wing broadcaster.)

“But there were no live shows on KRKS  at the time Tebow was able to call,” Kelley told me. “I was hanging out, and so it was like, hey, it’s Tebow on the line, do you want to do an interview with him. I thought sure, I’ll talk to the kid. He wasn’t nearly as popular as he is know, at least as a Bronco.

“I said, hey Tim, would you mind doing a quick liner for me, because it’s a new show and it would be a great favor, and I’d appreciate it. And sure, he did it. He was gracious in doing it. I don’t know if he got himself in trouble. Or if someone would say, You can’t use Tebow. He’s ours!”

“KOA has a franchise on the Broncos,” Kelley pointed out. “But they don’t have the franchise on Tim Tebow necessarily.”

That’s the kind of thinking Tebow would love.

You have to hope the person most proud of Kelley is Dan Caplis.