Life after football can still be impactful. Look at what former Florida star Tim Tebow has been doing with the Tim Tebow Foundation. Since 2010, it has rescued more than 3,500 children and operates in 60 countries. But even with those numbers, the mission is far from finished. And this time, he’s got the former Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze standing beside him. 

“Jill and I are more than thrilled to join the Tim Tebow Foundation in helping raise money and bring awareness to trafficking victims right here in our states,” Hugh Freeze declared on X on March 6. “They are image bearers of our loving God and the true MVP’s. @TimTebow.”

This partnership isn’t surprising as they have built a relationship over the years rooted in faith and mutual respect. When Auburn hired Hugh Freeze in 2022, Tim Tebow was one of the first major voices publicly backing the move with his stamp of approval. He also visited the Tigers’ fall camp in August 2023 to speak with the team. And behind the scenes, his influence extended into Freeze’s personal life as well who also partnered with the Tim Tebow Foundation on several ministry efforts.

The urgency surrounding their current mission goes far beyond fundraising because the numbers tied to online child exploitation are rising at an alarming rate. Right now, according to the organization, more than 89,000 children are still waiting to be identified and protected. And Tim Tebow isn’t staying quiet about it.

In January, Tim Tebow appeared before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. It urged lawmakers to pass the Renewed Hope Act of 2026, a bipartisan effort designed to strengthen the fight against online child exploitation. 

The bill, introduced alongside U.S. Representatives Laurel Lee and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, aims to create a larger national team of analysts, investigators, and forensic specialists dedicated to identifying children appearing in abusive images. During his testimony, Tim Tebow delivered a blunt message to lawmakers.

“It is a thin line between tortured and treasured,” he said. “And you are that thin line. Every day we wait, they’re suffering, they’re crying, and I believe right now many of them are praying that we would respond… For too long, hundreds of thousands of girls and boys have endured horrific abuse, often at the hands of adults who are supposed to protect them. Children in our nation are living in the darkest of evils, crying out for help. Their pain must stir us to act.”

The statistics backing his testimony are staggering. When he previously testified before the House Judiciary Committee in March 2024 during the hearing titled “A Voice for the Voiceless,” officials estimated that 57,000 unidentified children appeared in abusive image databases. Today that number has climbed past 89,000. And that’s just one database.

Tim Tebow revealed that Interpol’s system alone holds tens of thousands of unidentified abuse image series. Meanwhile Canada’s database contains more than 94 million uncategorized files pulled from the dark web. But that’s not all.

Numbers rise to alarming high

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported 20.5 million cyber tipline reports in 2024 that covered more than 29.2 million suspected exploitation incidents. Another alarming rise is that over 338,000 unique U.S. IP addresses trading child abuse imagery have been identified. And that’s data for the last six months alone. The obvious problem here is the federal workforce tackling victim identification remains relatively small.

At the moment, the Homeland Security Investigations Cyber Crimes Center has just seven full-time analysts whose job is to identify victims appearing in those images. That’s why Tim Tebow has pushed so hard for the Renewed Hope Act, which would expand that workforce and build a larger national team focused entirely on identifying children so law enforcement can rescue them.

“Every day these children lose hope,” he said. “And it’s not the fault of law enforcement that these children wait. They need more resources, plain and simple.”

The legislation has already cleared committee markup in the House, marking a significant step forward. And as the movement grows, so does the list of supporters. Now, that list includes Hugh Freeze who’s decided his next chapter will involve something bigger than football.