If You're Making a Brand Wager, Do You Go Tebow or Brady?

Barring another outbreak of Tebowmania on the field at Gillette Stadium on Saturday, the New England Patriots seem poised to take another step on a return to possible Super Bowl glory by defeating the Denver Broncos in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs.

But if you were a brand executive assessing the field of highly paid athletes and betting on longer-term endorsement outcomes, not the scoreboard for this particular contest, on which starting quarterback would you place a bet: Tom Brady, the Patriots' pretty-boy field general with the California pedigree, supermodel wife in Gisele Bundchen and other trappings of a jet-setter lifestyle? Or Tim Tebow, the home-schooled Floridian, son of evangelical missionaries and run-minded leader who confesses to one 'vice': vanilla ice cream?

It's a timely question for a number of reasons, one being that neither has begun a full exploitation of his commercial potential.

That's rather surprising for Brady, who arguably has been the NFL's best — as well as its most photogenic — quarterback for the last decade. He's had a relationship with Visa, but his most notable endorsement deal lately has been with UGG Australia, the sheepskin footwear brand, and its parent company Deckers. This is not exactly a brand that reeks of testosterone, though the company has been doing men's boots for decades. But the Brady-UGG partnership may be attracting female customers.

Meanwhile, Tebow's principal endorsement deal has been with Jockey, the privately held, Wisconsin-based underwear brand that tied him up last year, long before he became an on-the-field phenomenon, and currently features him shirtless on its website.

The Jockey deal isn't even the imprimatur that Tebow is best known for. He and his mother, Pam Tebow, were the stars of a controversial ad that ran during the Super Bowl two years ago for Focus on the Family, put there by the Christian family-boosting organization to spread the message that Tebow was alive because Mom refused doctors' advice to abort him out of their concerns about her medical complications.

Those relatively scant brand-spokesman histories aside, what would brand executives see in attaching themselves now to either man, perhaps regardless of the result on Sunday, or of whether either the Broncos or Patriots make it to the Super Bowl?

If Brady were now to shed his apparent past reluctance to get into major endorsement deals and put himself out there more, he could be cast by brands looking for a comeback story, for example: It's been four years since his team appeared in the Super Bowl, where in 2008 they were ignominiously defeated by the New York Giants after a perfect regular season. And he's been on a strong upward arc again since he came back in 2009 from a season-ending knee injury in 2008.

Tebow, despite enduring mocking for his religious beliefs, should have his pick of some new brand deals in the year ahead: Despite the polarizing nature of his faith talk and walk, he's become the most popular athlete in America these days.

Some brands need not apply: Axe, for instance. And Budweiser and Miller will steer clear, because Tebow is a teetotaler. But if a brand is looking for an ambassador for a story of inspiration, determination and that special something (Chrysler, post-Eminem, perhaps? Pepsi on the comeback trail? Maybe Sears, depending on how things turn out?) then Tebow might be your man.