LiveBall Sports

Before looking at the super bowl match-up from a few different angles, I wanted to take a quick look back at Kurt Warner’s retirement, and where exactly the Cardinals are left in terms of quarterback.

Basically, we understand already that it’s Matt Leinart’s job to lose.  But what kind of quarterback is Matt Leinart, and can he hang on to the job?  Will he be the one to get the Cardinals back to the playoffs next year?  Does he have to in order to have a future?  And who, if anyone else, is available for the Cardinals to chase?

Question #1: exactly who is this Leinart kid? Matt Leinart hasn’t accomplished much in the NFL except that he earned his reputation as a bit of a party boy which, unlike in the past, is viewed as a character flaw for an NFL quarterback, rather than the product of a personality that is shared by all great gunslingers.

The first thing that strikes me in my Leinart analysis is that, clearly, he has the goods as far as an NFL player is concerned.  Accuracy at the NFL level has been an issue, but Leinart can play within the offense without a major dropoff from Kurt Warner, and he’ll get the ball out on time without questioning what he’s seeing.  The arm strength here is good, but not great.  The completion percentage isn’t there yet, but he got it up to 66.7% in a small (77 attempts) sample this year.  It raised his career totals to 57.1%

In other words, Matt Leinart is very much in the same boat as Brady Quinn, though the method of arriving there was very different.  The thing that stands out about Leinart at the pro level is a poor touchdown rate in an offense that Kurt Warner lit up the league in.  This, essentially is an extension of his accuracy issues.  Warner could use the vast advantage he had in talent to extend drives on third down, and Leinart sometimes misses on easily defined throws.  He may never become a 20 TD guy in the NFL, but teams–especially good teams–should be able to win with less.

Leinart won’t make the big mistake to hurt his team, but he’s a medium to low efficiency player at the NFL, and his future might ultimately be in the dreaded game-manager mold.

Question #2: Who’s the competition? If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that Leinart will be getting competition for this job from all directions.  Two veteran names that come to mind to replace Warner on the roster are Miami’s Chad Pennington, an unrestricted free agent, and Tampa Bay’s Byron Leftwich, who figures to be released from the last year of his contract.  Shaun Hill is another guy who might stay within the division if he is released by San Francisco.

But Leinart is also going to get competition from a rookie due to the massive depth of the quarterback class in this NFL Draft–not for the job this year–but for the quarterback of the future designation.  If Leinart loses, he’s not guaranteed a roster spot at all: Ken Whisenhunt would be willing to go with a veteran acquisition at No. 1, particularly Pennington, and Brian St. Pierre as the No. 2 guy.

Warner’s retirement really kills the Cards leverage with regards to Leinart’s trade value.  A year ago, the Cards probably could have flipped him for a second round pick to a team like Tampa or the Jets if they had acted promptly prior to the Jets.  Now, the Cards need Matt Leinart to be the guy who keeps their playoff streak together while the defense becomes the type of unit that this offense can win because of.  He’ll either be the franchise guy here by year’s end, or he will be expendable, but without very much trade value.

Question #3:  What kind of timetable is there for replacing Warner?  Everything we think we know about Ken Whisenhunt suggest that he’s not in a rush to get things right.  It’s critical to him that everything that happens in Arizona under his watch happens the right way in the right order.  With Kurt Warner’s retirement hardly catching the Cardinals by surprise, this becomes Matt Leinart’s team.

Clearly, however, there is no timetable on how long Leinart will be the unquestioned number one guy.  There’s no reason to suggest that the Cardinals have given up hope that Leinart can be the quarterback that he was drafted to be by Arizona, but these guys are realists.  The only reason that Warner and Leinart were in a QB battle in the first place is not because it was obvious that Warner actually had a lot to add to his hall of fame resume, but that even in a limited time, it was obvious that Warner was the better quarterback.

That’s not because Leinart was a poor prospect, but it is because he hasn’t really turned into a great prospect.  And the time remaining on Leinart’s “prospect” status is down to about a year, if that long.  The only thing we know about him right now is that he can handle the demands of his position.

Whisenhunt is also a quarterback-intentive coach, which means that he will find someone better than Leinart if he doesn’t develop into anything more than a ball distributor at a reasonable age.  And we’ve also seen in the past that once the conclusion has been made that Leinart is not ready, Whisenhunt has been willing to go significant older to get the type of efficiency his offense requires.

It’s critical, more for the Cardinals than the player, that Leinart continues to improve at quarterback, and gets his completion percentage and TD rates up to what the Cardinals offense allows them to be from a guy who is making the plays that he has needed to.  To date, the Cardinals offense since the firing of Denny Green has proven a poor schematic fit for Leinart, but with all the time he has had to sit and watch the position played by a master, things could be different this time around.

Or they might not be, in which case, Leinart becomes a sunk cost to the Cardinals.

In summary, Leinart is going to get the first crack at being the next franchise quarterbacks of the Cardinals, but he only has a few demerits remaining before he fails for the last time, and gets released into NFL-backup oblivion.  For the sake of party-boy quarterbacks everywhere, America pulls for you Matt Leinart.  May you throw five or six touchdowns against a Pete Carroll led defense this year.