Football Article about a young QB....

Mecca · 08-29-2008, 02:57 AM

Passing judgment: It's too soon to call Leinart's NFL career a bust

Last weekend you might have heard that Matt Leinart stunk it up in the "all-important'' third preseason game, throwing three interceptions in 12 passing attempts against the Raiders and posting a microscopic 2.8 passer rating. Predictably, soon thereafter came the anonymously sourced report he was about to lose his job as the Cardinals starting quarterback. He hasn't yet, but that almost seems besides the point.

Such was Leinart's plight in recent days, and some how, some way, even though we haven't even reached the end of August yet, it has become something of a foregone conclusion his days as the No. 1 in Arizona are indeed numbered. The shorthand has quickly become: Leinart's a failure, and the Cardinals are Kurt Warner's team once again. That judgment made, we moved on to other juicier topics like Michael Strahan's potential un-retirement or whether the four-game preseason has finally out-lived its usefulness.

But hold on just a minute. How exactly did things reach such a crossroads so suddenly for Leinart, the draft's 10th overall pick just two years ago? How is it there's this rush to label his era in Arizona almost ended before it has even begun? And yes, almost before it has even begun is entirely apt. Here are a few reminders that might surprise you in the case of Leinart's still-nascent Cardinals career:

• The former Heisman-winning USC quarterback has started only 16 games in his first two years in the desert, the equivalent of one full regular season. He has missed 12 games due to shoulder injuries -- including last year's broken left collarbone, which ended his season after five starts -- made one relief appearance, and sat the bench for three others.

• Leinart, who turned 25 in May, is 7-9 as a Cardinals starter. That's not a great record by any means, but for a team that has made the playoffs just once (1998) in the past 26 years, it's not too shabby. By comparison, in games Leinart hasn't started the past two years, Arizona is 6-10.

• To be sure, Leinart's meltdown against Oakland last Saturday night was hide-the-children's-eyes ugly. But he had passer ratings of 114.1 and 108.9 in the Cardinals' previous two preseason games, with one touchdown pass and nary a turnover. Again, Leinart this year is returning from a major injury to his left shoulder, which is no trivial issue for a guy who makes his living with his left arm.

• Lastly, a check of Leinart's career numbers show he is well within the statistical norm for a young quarterback still learning his craft. He has thrown for 3,194 yards in those 16-plus games, with a 56.0 completion percentage, 13 touchdowns, 16 interceptions and a 71.2 passer rating. As a rookie in 2006, he had 100-plus passer ratings in three of his final six starts, and threw for an NFL rookie-record 405 yards in a November game at Minnesota. But in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately NFL, especially in this age of instant analysis, can anyone even remember back that far?

All in all, it hardly adds up to anything that makes Leinart worthy of a hasty assignment to the scrap heap. While one can rightfully claim the 37-year-old Warner probably gives the Cardinals a better chance of winning games right now, Arizona head coach Ken Whisenhunt at the least will be keeping Leinart on a very short leash when it comes to the starting role. The quick take that has morphed into conventional wisdom is it was Leinart's job to lose, and he appears to be losing it.

But even if that is the case, and Leinart doesn't wind up starting Week 1 this season, I'm amazed so many seem to have already reached the conclusion he can't possibly end up succeeding in Arizona. What we've seen so far certainly shouldn't relegate him to failure status at the tender age of 25, with just those 16 starts under his belt. That's way too harsh, way too soon, and lacking in anything resembling long-term perspective.

Thinking about Leinart's deteriorating situation this week led me to recall another highly regarded collegiate quarterback from California, who, like Leinart, was drafted in the NFL's top 10 and then struggled for the better part of his first three seasons before finding his stride in the league. Both Leinart, who went 10th in 2006, and Trent Dilfer, selected 6th by Tampa Bay in 1994, were the second quarterbacks taken in their draft classes, behind Tennessee's Vince Young (No. 3) and Washington's Heath Shuler (No. 3), respectively.

I was a Bucs beat writer covering the young Dilfer, who started just two games as a rookie in '94, and then made all 16 of Tampa Bay's starts in 1995. In his first 18 often-ragged NFL starts, Dilfer threw for five touchdowns, 24 interceptions, absorbed 55 sacks, completed 52.7 of his passes for 3,207 yards, and compiled QB abysmal ratings of 36.3 and 60.1 in those two seasons. In other words, his career got off to a considerably worse start than Leinart's, with both passers happening to toil for long downtrodden, non-winning franchises.

Judging by the first two years of his career, Dilfer should have been toast as an NFL quarterback. A complete first-round bust. But a funny thing happened on his way to infamy. By his third season, in 1996, Dilfer was respectable. By year four, he was an NFC Pro Bowl quarterback, and Tampa Bay was a playoff team for the first time in 15 years. In the seventh season of what would eventually become a 14-year NFL career, Dilfer started and won a Super Bowl with Baltimore. So when Dilfer sees Leinart's struggles today, few can understand and empathize to the degree he can.

"Sixteen starts into his career, to have people already saying he doesn't have it, that's ludicrous,'' the recently retired Dilfer told me in a phone interview this week. "For a quarterback in this league, it really takes about 40 starts until you can truly see and evaluate someone. Until then, in trying to make a judgment about a guy, you're being way too subjective.''

In his new post-playing days career as one of ESPN's multitude of NFL analysts, Dilfer is preparing to make weekly top-of-the-head pronouncements about the highs and lows of players around the league, especially the always-under-the-microscope set: the quarterbacks. But he knows better than most the pithy comment and the, ahem, snap judgment is often an invitation to be wrong when it comes to young quarterbacks and their far-from-pretty-to-watch learning process.

"The major thing I see in general about young quarterbacks are that the expectations are too high, too soon, and because of that, how they get evaluated and the perspective of those evaluating them is a little warped,'' said Dilfer, who retired this offseason after spending the past two seasons backing up yet another struggling young quarterback, 2005 first overall pick Alex Smith in San Francisco. "You're expecting to see third or fourth-year polish on someone who's just not there yet.

"It was really into my fourth year in Tampa before I realized I could play in this league, and understood what it took to be successful. I was just awful up until 40 starts or so. Those first two years, it was bad. I didn't do much of anything particularly well. But a lot of these questions just can't be answered until further down the line.''

Dilfer takes pains to note he's not saying Leinart necessarily deserves to play ahead of the more productive Warner right now, or that Arizona will reerun his development if they don't keep him as their starter for all 16 games this season. He concedes "the guy in front of him is probably better right now, and Leinart probably would be better off for sitting a while this year.''

But when he hears the judgments being passed about Leinart's still-formative NFL game, he can't help but point out the fallacies he believes are being employed by those who have rushed to label Leinart a failure.

"They keep talking about his lack of arm strength, but if that was the only component, you think people wouldn't have given up on Steve Young early on, or even Joe Montana?'' Dilfer said. "Are you kidding me? Those guys didn't have big arms, but that didn't stop them from being Hall of Fame quarterbacks.

"If you get to start your career with a couple years on the bench before you have to play, like a Tony Romo or a Steve McNair or a Chad Pennington, then you can judge them quickly when they get their chance to play. But to be thrown in the fire as a rookie quarterback in this league, and be judged on just your body of work for your first 16 games or so, that's ludicrous.''

Dilfer estimates it took until at least midway through his third season -- when he was approaching his 30th career start -- until he started playing fast enough to keep up with the rapid speed in which the NFL game unfolds. That's when his hesitancy decreased and more of his instinctual play surfaced. In short, he had seen enough action to have mental pictures of what has to happen on the field to execute successfully at quarterback. You can't really know what it looks like until you've endured the trial and error phase of learning the position, and many young highly touted quarterbacks never get the luxury of playing their way through that often unsightly process.

"There's no freedom to fail any more for the young quarterback in the NFL,'' Dilfer said. "And every young quarterback has to have some freedom to fail. They can be told and shown what to work on, but when they fail at it, it can't be the end of the world. It's part of the learning curve. You need the freedom to learn from those failures, and learn how to get back up.

"What's happened with Matt, and Alex Smith, and David Carr in Houston is that when they made mistakes, they've had their teammates, the fans, the media and their coaches all talking about it so much that every mistake has been magnified. They've never been given the freedom to be rough around the edges for a while. And a quarterback who is tentative and afraid of making mistakes is a quarterback who will never be playing at maximum potential.''

In Leinart's case, the bar of expectation has been so high in part because he was supposed to have entered the NFL as pro-ready as any quarterback in recent memory. USC is basically the NFL's 33rd franchise, right? And the Trojans' pro-style and sophisticated offense was ideally suited to Leinart making a quick transition to a league where the passing game reigns supreme.

But it hasn't been quick enough to keep the stench of failure away from Leinart, or buy him enough time to finish the maturation process he's still in the middle of. And now, with the pressure starting to truly build on Leinart in Arizona, Dilfer sees a young player who has lost confidence and can almost hear the clock ticking on his franchise-quarterback opportunity.

"It's information overload for a lot of young quarterbacks, and that leads to not playing fast and a lack of decisiveness,'' Dilfer said. "When you're not decisive, many times you just haven't seen everything out there on the field that you need to see. You haven't had enough reps yet. You can't just grip it and rip it. That leads to a lack of fundamentals and overall sloppiness.''

And that leads to another young quarterback in crisis mode. And usually to the bench. Which is where many believe Leinart is soon headed. It has been yet another quick trip to a crossroads for a first-round quarterback. In the NFL, the journey from draft-day prospect to a suspect career seems to get faster all the time.

Mecca · 08-29-2008, 03:00 AM

And Pete Carroll offered this as to why he thinks Leinart is struggling..

Leinart is still waiting for one from head coach Ken Whisenhunt, who is keeping all of us guessing, not just Leinart and Warner.

While I was listening to The Dan Patrick Show, an interesting subject came to light when Patrick was interviewing Leinart's college coach, Southern California's Pete Carroll.

Carroll was responding to the idea of naming Warner the starter over Leinart. Carroll expressed his disappointment for Leinart, and then offered a gem some of us might have overlooked.

He suggested that Whisenhunt's "tough love" approach is probably not the best way to keep Leinart motivated and on top of his game.

"Matt was in a situation where they didn't know what they felt about him and where he had to show up and prove it and make a big statement that he was the guy, and that might have not let him be at his best," Carroll said. " . . . Because when Matt wasn't our starting quarterback and he was battling Matt Cassel, he wasn't very good.

"The day we told him we're going to give you the chance to be the starter, he looked at us and there was a twinkle in his eye like, 'You're never going to regret it,' and we never did."

It goes back to what Leinart told a reporter last year when he said he wanted the Cardinals to sink or swim with him as The Man.

**doomy3** · 08-29-2008, 05:15 AM

Who gives a shit?

Mecca · 08-29-2008, 05:18 AM

He was drafted the same year Croyle was.....it's all relative...

He's the one being put in the funky spot, even Croyle is being given much more of a chance than he is...I just thought people would like to know there is a team that handles a QB worse than Herm Edwards does.

**OnTheWarpath15** · 08-29-2008, 05:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mecca

He was drafted the same year Croyle was.....it's all relative...

He's the one being put in the funky spot, even Croyle is being given much more of a chance than he is...I just thought people would like to know there is a team that handles a QB worse than Herm Edwards does.

16 starts is less of a chance than 6 starts?

Interesting.

beach tribe · 08-29-2008, 05:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OnTheWarpath58

16 starts is less of a chance than 6 starts?

Interesting.

I don't ever remember Croyle ever throwing 3ints in 12 passes.

**OnTheWarpath15** · 08-29-2008, 05:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by beach tribe

I don't ever remember Croyle ever throwing 3ints in 12 passes.

Me either.

I don't remember Croyle missing 11 games due to injury either.

But Croyle, who's missed a game and a half, is the injury prone one...

RibKing67 · 08-29-2008, 06:01 AM

I feel like I need to go Mr Robinsons neighborhood.... Boys and girls can you say double standard?

Hammock Parties · 08-29-2008, 06:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by beach tribe

I don't ever remember Croyle ever throwing 3ints in 12 passes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by OnTheWarpath58

Me either.

I don't remember Croyle missing 11 games due to injury either.

But Croyle, who's missed a game and a half, is the injury prone one...

Mecca · 08-29-2008, 06:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OnTheWarpath58

16 starts is less of a chance than 6 starts?

Interesting.

Whoa Whoa Whoa....most of his starts came under Dennis Green.....when I say worse position picture this..

What the Cardinals have done would be like if Croyle started the first 5 or 6 games this year then benched him for Huard, then in the next preseason declared it an open competition again.

They've created a situation where neither QB is comfortable they are constantly looking over their shoulder in fear of 1 mistake sending them to the bench no one can play their game.

Once you go to the young guy you stick with that you don't go back to the vet you create all sorts of issues that way.

It's example of Ken Whisenhunt literally having no idea what he's doing. When Leinart was undoubtedly the guy under Green he played better.....so what Carroll says has some truth to it.

Mecca · 08-29-2008, 06:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OnTheWarpath58

Me either.

I don't remember Croyle missing 11 games due to injury either.

But Croyle, who's missed a game and a half, is the injury prone one...

Broken Collarbone is 1 injury and doesn't compare to..two blown knees and a torn labrum.....

Mecca · 08-29-2008, 06:08 AM

Also when I say I want to see something from Brodie Croyle..

• Threw for 200 yards or more in eight of his first 11 starts in 2006; completed 60% or more of his passes in five of his final six starts.
• In 2006, became the first Cardinals quarterback since Jake Plummer in 2001 to have three games in a season with a 100+ quarterback rating (all were in his final six starts of ’06).
• Became the first rookie in NFL history to throw for over 400 yards in a game when he passed for 405 at Minnesota on 11/26/06. The previous league record belonged to Plummer who threw for 388 yards against the New York Giants on 11/16/97.
• Leinart's 2,547 yards passing in 2006 also broke Plummer's franchise rookie record of 2,203 yards, set in 1997.
• Became first QB in NFL history to throw two TD passes in the first quarter of each of his first two games when he did it vs. Kansas City and Chicago.

Leinart did all that in his rookie year...which is more than Croyle I don't think there is an argument there...

It's just an example that Ken Whisenhunt and the Arizona Cardinals have 0 idea of how to properly handle a QB, especially this specific one.

Hammock Parties · 08-29-2008, 06:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mecca

Broken Collarbone is 1 injury and doesn't compare to..two blown knees and a torn labrum.....

IN THE NFL

DIPSHIT

RibKing67 · 08-29-2008, 06:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mecca

Broken Collarbone is 1 injury and doesn't compare to..two blown knees and a torn labrum.....

Brodie hurt his hand that is less of an injury than a broken collarbone. I cant think of another injury Brodie has suffered in the NFL.

Mecca · 08-29-2008, 06:11 AM

Um injury history doesn't begin and end at the NFL level, I'd tell you Adrian Peterson is injury prone because he's missed games due to injury 3 consecutive years now...

Honestly saying any player is more injury prone than Croyle is laughable. Atleast tell me he has a better arm than Leinart since that one is true.

08-29-2008, 02:57 AM
Mecca Hockey Town Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Kansas City, Missouri Casino cash: $2607050	Article about a young QB.... Passing judgment: It's too soon to call Leinart's NFL career a bust Last weekend you might have heard that Matt Leinart stunk it up in the "all-important'' third preseason game, throwing three interceptions in 12 passing attempts against the Raiders and posting a microscopic 2.8 passer rating. Predictably, soon thereafter came the anonymously sourced report he was about to lose his job as the Cardinals starting quarterback. He hasn't yet, but that almost seems besides the point. Such was Leinart's plight in recent days, and some how, some way, even though we haven't even reached the end of August yet, it has become something of a foregone conclusion his days as the No. 1 in Arizona are indeed numbered. The shorthand has quickly become: Leinart's a failure, and the Cardinals are Kurt Warner's team once again. That judgment made, we moved on to other juicier topics like Michael Strahan's potential un-retirement or whether the four-game preseason has finally out-lived its usefulness. But hold on just a minute. How exactly did things reach such a crossroads so suddenly for Leinart, the draft's 10th overall pick just two years ago? How is it there's this rush to label his era in Arizona almost ended before it has even begun? And yes, almost before it has even begun is entirely apt. Here are a few reminders that might surprise you in the case of Leinart's still-nascent Cardinals career: • The former Heisman-winning USC quarterback has started only 16 games in his first two years in the desert, the equivalent of one full regular season. He has missed 12 games due to shoulder injuries -- including last year's broken left collarbone, which ended his season after five starts -- made one relief appearance, and sat the bench for three others. • Leinart, who turned 25 in May, is 7-9 as a Cardinals starter. That's not a great record by any means, but for a team that has made the playoffs just once (1998) in the past 26 years, it's not too shabby. By comparison, in games Leinart hasn't started the past two years, Arizona is 6-10. • To be sure, Leinart's meltdown against Oakland last Saturday night was hide-the-children's-eyes ugly. But he had passer ratings of 114.1 and 108.9 in the Cardinals' previous two preseason games, with one touchdown pass and nary a turnover. Again, Leinart this year is returning from a major injury to his left shoulder, which is no trivial issue for a guy who makes his living with his left arm. • Lastly, a check of Leinart's career numbers show he is well within the statistical norm for a young quarterback still learning his craft. He has thrown for 3,194 yards in those 16-plus games, with a 56.0 completion percentage, 13 touchdowns, 16 interceptions and a 71.2 passer rating. As a rookie in 2006, he had 100-plus passer ratings in three of his final six starts, and threw for an NFL rookie-record 405 yards in a November game at Minnesota. But in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately NFL, especially in this age of instant analysis, can anyone even remember back that far? All in all, it hardly adds up to anything that makes Leinart worthy of a hasty assignment to the scrap heap. While one can rightfully claim the 37-year-old Warner probably gives the Cardinals a better chance of winning games right now, Arizona head coach Ken Whisenhunt at the least will be keeping Leinart on a very short leash when it comes to the starting role. The quick take that has morphed into conventional wisdom is it was Leinart's job to lose, and he appears to be losing it. But even if that is the case, and Leinart doesn't wind up starting Week 1 this season, I'm amazed so many seem to have already reached the conclusion he can't possibly end up succeeding in Arizona. What we've seen so far certainly shouldn't relegate him to failure status at the tender age of 25, with just those 16 starts under his belt. That's way too harsh, way too soon, and lacking in anything resembling long-term perspective. Thinking about Leinart's deteriorating situation this week led me to recall another highly regarded collegiate quarterback from California, who, like Leinart, was drafted in the NFL's top 10 and then struggled for the better part of his first three seasons before finding his stride in the league. Both Leinart, who went 10th in 2006, and Trent Dilfer, selected 6th by Tampa Bay in 1994, were the second quarterbacks taken in their draft classes, behind Tennessee's Vince Young (No. 3) and Washington's Heath Shuler (No. 3), respectively. I was a Bucs beat writer covering the young Dilfer, who started just two games as a rookie in '94, and then made all 16 of Tampa Bay's starts in 1995. In his first 18 often-ragged NFL starts, Dilfer threw for five touchdowns, 24 interceptions, absorbed 55 sacks, completed 52.7 of his passes for 3,207 yards, and compiled QB abysmal ratings of 36.3 and 60.1 in those two seasons. In other words, his career got off to a considerably worse start than Leinart's, with both passers happening to toil for long downtrodden, non-winning franchises. Judging by the first two years of his career, Dilfer should have been toast as an NFL quarterback. A complete first-round bust. But a funny thing happened on his way to infamy. By his third season, in 1996, Dilfer was respectable. By year four, he was an NFC Pro Bowl quarterback, and Tampa Bay was a playoff team for the first time in 15 years. In the seventh season of what would eventually become a 14-year NFL career, Dilfer started and won a Super Bowl with Baltimore. So when Dilfer sees Leinart's struggles today, few can understand and empathize to the degree he can. "Sixteen starts into his career, to have people already saying he doesn't have it, that's ludicrous,'' the recently retired Dilfer told me in a phone interview this week. "For a quarterback in this league, it really takes about 40 starts until you can truly see and evaluate someone. Until then, in trying to make a judgment about a guy, you're being way too subjective.'' In his new post-playing days career as one of ESPN's multitude of NFL analysts, Dilfer is preparing to make weekly top-of-the-head pronouncements about the highs and lows of players around the league, especially the always-under-the-microscope set: the quarterbacks. But he knows better than most the pithy comment and the, ahem, snap judgment is often an invitation to be wrong when it comes to young quarterbacks and their far-from-pretty-to-watch learning process. "The major thing I see in general about young quarterbacks are that the expectations are too high, too soon, and because of that, how they get evaluated and the perspective of those evaluating them is a little warped,'' said Dilfer, who retired this offseason after spending the past two seasons backing up yet another struggling young quarterback, 2005 first overall pick Alex Smith in San Francisco. "You're expecting to see third or fourth-year polish on someone who's just not there yet. "It was really into my fourth year in Tampa before I realized I could play in this league, and understood what it took to be successful. I was just awful up until 40 starts or so. Those first two years, it was bad. I didn't do much of anything particularly well. But a lot of these questions just can't be answered until further down the line.'' Dilfer takes pains to note he's not saying Leinart necessarily deserves to play ahead of the more productive Warner right now, or that Arizona will reerun his development if they don't keep him as their starter for all 16 games this season. He concedes "the guy in front of him is probably better right now, and Leinart probably would be better off for sitting a while this year.'' But when he hears the judgments being passed about Leinart's still-formative NFL game, he can't help but point out the fallacies he believes are being employed by those who have rushed to label Leinart a failure. "They keep talking about his lack of arm strength, but if that was the only component, you think people wouldn't have given up on Steve Young early on, or even Joe Montana?'' Dilfer said. "Are you kidding me? Those guys didn't have big arms, but that didn't stop them from being Hall of Fame quarterbacks. "If you get to start your career with a couple years on the bench before you have to play, like a Tony Romo or a Steve McNair or a Chad Pennington, then you can judge them quickly when they get their chance to play. But to be thrown in the fire as a rookie quarterback in this league, and be judged on just your body of work for your first 16 games or so, that's ludicrous.'' Dilfer estimates it took until at least midway through his third season -- when he was approaching his 30th career start -- until he started playing fast enough to keep up with the rapid speed in which the NFL game unfolds. That's when his hesitancy decreased and more of his instinctual play surfaced. In short, he had seen enough action to have mental pictures of what has to happen on the field to execute successfully at quarterback. You can't really know what it looks like until you've endured the trial and error phase of learning the position, and many young highly touted quarterbacks never get the luxury of playing their way through that often unsightly process. "There's no freedom to fail any more for the young quarterback in the NFL,'' Dilfer said. "And every young quarterback has to have some freedom to fail. They can be told and shown what to work on, but when they fail at it, it can't be the end of the world. It's part of the learning curve. You need the freedom to learn from those failures, and learn how to get back up. "What's happened with Matt, and Alex Smith, and David Carr in Houston is that when they made mistakes, they've had their teammates, the fans, the media and their coaches all talking about it so much that every mistake has been magnified. They've never been given the freedom to be rough around the edges for a while. And a quarterback who is tentative and afraid of making mistakes is a quarterback who will never be playing at maximum potential.'' In Leinart's case, the bar of expectation has been so high in part because he was supposed to have entered the NFL as pro-ready as any quarterback in recent memory. USC is basically the NFL's 33rd franchise, right? And the Trojans' pro-style and sophisticated offense was ideally suited to Leinart making a quick transition to a league where the passing game reigns supreme. But it hasn't been quick enough to keep the stench of failure away from Leinart, or buy him enough time to finish the maturation process he's still in the middle of. And now, with the pressure starting to truly build on Leinart in Arizona, Dilfer sees a young player who has lost confidence and can almost hear the clock ticking on his franchise-quarterback opportunity. "It's information overload for a lot of young quarterbacks, and that leads to not playing fast and a lack of decisiveness,'' Dilfer said. "When you're not decisive, many times you just haven't seen everything out there on the field that you need to see. You haven't had enough reps yet. You can't just grip it and rip it. That leads to a lack of fundamentals and overall sloppiness.'' And that leads to another young quarterback in crisis mode. And usually to the bench. Which is where many believe Leinart is soon headed. It has been yet another quick trip to a crossroads for a first-round quarterback. In the NFL, the journey from draft-day prospect to a suspect career seems to get faster all the time.
Posts: 110,956

08-29-2008, 03:00 AM	#2
Mecca Hockey Town Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Kansas City, Missouri Casino cash: $2607050	And Pete Carroll offered this as to why he thinks Leinart is struggling.. Leinart is still waiting for one from head coach Ken Whisenhunt, who is keeping all of us guessing, not just Leinart and Warner. While I was listening to The Dan Patrick Show, an interesting subject came to light when Patrick was interviewing Leinart's college coach, Southern California's Pete Carroll. Carroll was responding to the idea of naming Warner the starter over Leinart. Carroll expressed his disappointment for Leinart, and then offered a gem some of us might have overlooked. He suggested that Whisenhunt's "tough love" approach is probably not the best way to keep Leinart motivated and on top of his game. "Matt was in a situation where they didn't know what they felt about him and where he had to show up and prove it and make a big statement that he was the guy, and that might have not let him be at his best," Carroll said. " . . . Because when Matt wasn't our starting quarterback and he was battling Matt Cassel, he wasn't very good. "The day we told him we're going to give you the chance to be the starter, he looked at us and there was a twinkle in his eye like, 'You're never going to regret it,' and we never did." It goes back to what Leinart told a reporter last year when he said he wanted the Cardinals to sink or swim with him as The Man.
Posts: 110,956

08-29-2008, 05:15 AM	#3
doomy3 Supporter Join Date: Aug 2005 Casino cash: $5363539	Who gives a shit?
Posts: 12,854

08-29-2008, 05:18 AM	#4
Mecca Hockey Town Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Kansas City, Missouri Casino cash: $2607050	He was drafted the same year Croyle was.....it's all relative... He's the one being put in the funky spot, even Croyle is being given much more of a chance than he is...I just thought people would like to know there is a team that handles a QB worse than Herm Edwards does.
Posts: 110,956

08-29-2008, 06:01 AM	#8
RibKing67 Heavyweight Champion of Ribs! Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: Blue Springs, MO Casino cash: $10004900	I feel like I need to go Mr Robinsons neighborhood.... Boys and girls can you say double standard?
Posts: 422

08-29-2008, 06:08 AM	#12
Mecca Hockey Town Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Kansas City, Missouri Casino cash: $2607050	Also when I say I want to see something from Brodie Croyle.. • Threw for 200 yards or more in eight of his first 11 starts in 2006; completed 60% or more of his passes in five of his final six starts. • In 2006, became the first Cardinals quarterback since Jake Plummer in 2001 to have three games in a season with a 100+ quarterback rating (all were in his final six starts of ’06). • Became the first rookie in NFL history to throw for over 400 yards in a game when he passed for 405 at Minnesota on 11/26/06. The previous league record belonged to Plummer who threw for 388 yards against the New York Giants on 11/16/97. • Leinart's 2,547 yards passing in 2006 also broke Plummer's franchise rookie record of 2,203 yards, set in 1997. • Became first QB in NFL history to throw two TD passes in the first quarter of each of his first two games when he did it vs. Kansas City and Chicago. Leinart did all that in his rookie year...which is more than Croyle I don't think there is an argument there... It's just an example that Ken Whisenhunt and the Arizona Cardinals have 0 idea of how to properly handle a QB, especially this specific one.
Posts: 110,956

08-29-2008, 06:11 AM	#15
Mecca Hockey Town Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Kansas City, Missouri Casino cash: $2607050	Um injury history doesn't begin and end at the NFL level, I'd tell you Adrian Peterson is injury prone because he's missed games due to injury 3 consecutive years now... Honestly saying any player is more injury prone than Croyle is laughable. Atleast tell me he has a better arm than Leinart since that one is true.
Posts: 110,956