(Photo by Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images)

Bobby Bowden started a little kerfuffle by claiming that Charlie Ward may have been as good as Tim Tebow. Please note: he didn't say that Ward was better explicitly, he only stated that it was plausible. It is not nearly as far-fetched as Gator fans choose to believe.

After all, Bowden remembers that the national media frenzy over Charlie Ward was as big as it is over Tebow now, and when you consider that Ward's career came before the maximum exposure era of the Internet, blogs, and sports talk radio and also before ESPN became the monster that it is now, that is saying something.

Make no mistake, for two years Ward was the No. 1 star in college football and a major media phenomenon that transformed the sport. Even Madonna—who at the time was the globe's No. 1 celebrity—wanted to meet Ward (Ward declined).

And when Ward wasn't drafted by the NFL, it was a controversy that consumed the media for months (even Nightline did a cover story related to the issue.) So, the people who rolled their eyes when Bowden—who by the way has seen star QBs come and go in his time and even coached a few, including Super Bowl MVP and Pro Bowler Brad Johnson —when Bowden compared Tebow with Ward need to remember how quickly we forget.

Right down to being well known and embraced (and in some circles criticized, see here and here) for being a vocal evangelical Christian, the Charlie Ward phenomenon was every bit as large in the early 1990s as the Tebow one is now. 

Now realize that a direct comparison between Ward and Tebow are useless. Much to the chagrin of many Seminole fans, Bobby Bowden only played Charlie Ward for two years. (A defensible decision as his predecessor Casey Weldon finished No. 2 in Heisman voting to Desmond Howard.) Further, Ward and Tebow played in different systems.

Perhaps more important, the era was different. The wide-open style of football that allows QBs to put up huge numbers (including those who lets face it aren't very good) was unknown to major college football at the time.

What is more, Charlie Ward's shotgun offense at FSU was one of the things that paved the way for our current era of spread football. It can fairly be said that Tebow is in many respects indebted to Ward for the fact that he is playing QB rather than LB or TE, because Ward was one of the first dual threat QBs playing big time college football outside of the veer and wishbone oriented offenses in the Big 8 (and Ward went 2-0 against one of the best QBs in Big 8 and college football history, Tommie Frazier).  

Still, some things should be established by anyone making the comparison to keep things honest.

1. It is obvious that Charlie Ward could run Urban Meyer's offense, for Ward was an option QB in high school. However, whether Tim Tebow could run Bobby Bowden's pro-style west coast offense is subject to debate.

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