Matt Leinart’s Cardinals Career: A Heisman Winner Who Couldn’t Win the Starting Job
The College Career That Made Everyone Believe
In 2004, Matt Leinart threw 38 touchdowns and nine interceptions for USC. His completion rate was 65 percent. His passer rating in bowl games hit 156 and 157 in back-to-back seasons. He finished 37-2 as a college starter, a number that still looks absurd when you stare at it. He led the Trojans to back-to-back AP national championships, won the Heisman, and did it all in Pete Carroll’s pro-style offense – the kind of system scouts specifically look for when projecting college quarterbacks to the next level.
He studied under Carson Palmer, who went first overall to Cincinnati in 2003 and became a Pro Bowl quarterback. The pipeline at USC was as legitimate as any in college football. Scouts weren’t projecting on hope. They were watching a 6-foot-5, 225-pound left-hander run a professional offense in the Pac-10 and picking almost nobody off. One interception every 54 attempts across his college career. By the time Leinart declared for the 2006 draft, he’d been the first overall projection for so long that falling to 10th felt, at the time, like Arizona getting away with something.
April 2006: Arizona Thinks It Stole the Draft
State Farm Stadium – then called University of Phoenix Stadium – had just opened. Edgerrin James had signed in free agency. Larry Fitzgerald was 22 years old and coming off a season with 103 catches. Anquan Boldin, after being shot in the face during a robbery in 2005, had come back and caught 69 balls. The Cardinals, for the first time in years, looked like a team that could compete if they just solved the quarterback problem. Then Leinart slid to them at 10, and the organization acted like they’d won the lottery.
His contract took the entire summer to negotiate. He was the last player from that draft class to sign, finally agreeing to a six-year, $51 million deal in August. The holdout created friction before he’d taken a single professional snap. Dennis Green, the head coach that year, wasn’t concerned. He pulled Leinart from backup duty in Week 3 after a poor performance from Warner and handed him the starting job. Leinart was 23 years old and playing his fourth professional game.
2006: The Best Year He’d Ever Have in the NFL
He threw for 405 yards against the Vikings in November. That set a rookie record at the time. He also threw two touchdown passes on Monday Night Football against the 5-0 Chicago Bears before losing 24-23 late. He finished the regular season with 2,547 yards, 11 touchdowns, and 12 interceptions across 11 starts, going 4-7. Not impressive, but not the catastrophe the later chapters of his career make it sound like in retrospect. The West Coast offense under Green suited his game. Short-to-intermediate throws, rhythm passing, timing routes. His arm strength – always the question mark – wasn’t exposed the way it would be later.
A sprained shoulder ended his season early. Arizona went 5-11. Green was fired. Ken Whisenhunt came in from Pittsburgh, where he’d been Ben Roethlisberger’s offensive coordinator. Whisenhunt liked the ball pushed downfield. He liked a quarterback who could stand tall in the pocket and drive throws into tight windows. He liked, essentially, the opposite of what Leinart did well. That mismatch, more than anything else, is what killed Leinart’s Cardinals career – though it took three more years to play out completely.
2007: Kurt Warner Takes the Job and Doesn’t Give It Back
Whisenhunt opened 2007 with a two-quarterback system. Through the first four games, Warner had thrown for 580 yards, four touchdowns and one interception. Leinart, in the same stretch, had 647 yards, two touchdowns, and four picks. Those numbers alone tell most of the story. Then in Week 5, Rams linebacker Will Witherspoon sacked Leinart and fractured his left collarbone. He went on IR. Warner won five of the final eight games. By January, nobody was seriously discussing whether Leinart would reclaim the starting job.
The 2008 preseason was the moment the door closed permanently. Leinart had been handed the job back after recovering from the collarbone. During the third preseason game against Oakland, he threw three interceptions in a matter of minutes. Whisenhunt named Warner the starter. Warner went on to lead Arizona to Super Bowl XLIII – a 27-23 loss to Pittsburgh that remains one of the most watched championship games in recent memory. Leinart watched from the sideline in Tampa. He completed 15 of 29 passes all season in mop-up appearances.
Here’s what doesn’t quite add up about the whole Whisenhunt-Leinart relationship: Whisenhunt reportedly had trouble getting along with Roethlisberger in Pittsburgh too, according to people close to that situation. Whether the coach had a pattern of conflict with big-name quarterbacks he didn’t choose, or whether Leinart genuinely wasn’t good enough regardless of scheme – those two possibilities don’t fully resolve against each other.
The Weapons That Make the Failure Harder to Excuse
JaMarcus Russell, drafted first overall in 2007, had no receiving corps worth mentioning in Oakland. Ryan Leaf, taken second overall by San Diego in 1998, played behind a patchwork offense. Leinart had Fitzgerald and Boldin. In 2007, Fitzgerald made his first Pro Bowl. Boldin was already one of the most physically dominant slot receivers in football. Adrian Wilson anchored the defense. For a quarterback labeled a bust, Leinart’s supporting cast was exceptional by any reasonable standard.
He completed 51.7 percent of his passes in 2008, one touchdown, one interception, in limited action. His career passer rating with the Cardinals finished at 70.8. His overall TD-to-INT ratio across four years was 14 touchdowns to 20 interceptions. Those are not numbers you can explain away with circumstance. Other busts at least had thin rosters as partial defense. Leinart did not have that argument available to him.
September 4, 2010: Released Two Days After the Final Preseason Game
Warner retired in January 2010. The Cardinals were Leinart’s team to lose, or so everyone assumed. Instead Whisenhunt signed free agent Derek Anderson, who had posted a 42.1 passer rating the previous season in Cleveland. In training camp, Anderson won the job. Leinart was outplayed. He publicly stated he believed he’d performed better in the preseason games by the numbers, and looking at those specific statistics, he had a point. It didn’t matter. On September 4 he was released unconditionally. Two days later he signed with the Houston Texans as a backup to Matt Schaub.
The Cardinals that season started Anderson, Max Hall, and John Skelton at quarterback. They went 5-11. Anderson completed 52.5 percent of his passes with nine touchdowns and ten interceptions before being benched. Whisenhunt chose all three of those options over a first-round pick with four years of organizational knowledge. That choice, more than anything, reveals how completely the coaching staff had lost confidence in Leinart. It wasn’t a competition where Leinart narrowly lost. It was a conclusion reached well before camp started.
After Arizona: Two More Collarbone Injuries and a Microphone
In Houston, Schaub played all 16 games in 2010 and Leinart didn’t see the field. In 2011, Schaub hurt his right foot in Week 10. Leinart started two games before fracturing his collarbone for the third time in his career, again after a sack. The same injury. The same result. He landed briefly with Oakland in 2012 and the Buffalo Bills in 2013 before his playing career ended without ceremony.
He joined Fox Sports in 2014. He’s been a regular on Big Noon Kickoff, the network’s Saturday college football pregame show, ever since. He married actress Josie Loren in 2018. He runs the Matt Leinart Foundation, which creates athletic opportunities for underprivileged youth in the Los Angeles area. In April 2025, standing outside Lambeau Field the day before the NFL Draft, he posted a video on Instagram addressed to Cardinals fans. He paused mid-sentence and said simply: I’m sorry. Truly I’m sorry it didn’t work out.
That video landed differently than most people expected. Cardinals fans, many of whom had spent years frustrated with him, responded with something closer to warmth than resentment. The moment didn’t rewrite history. It just made the history feel a little less clean-cut.
Was He a Bust, or Just the Wrong Quarterback in the Wrong System?
The honest answer is both, and the proportions matter. Leinart was not a top-10 caliber NFL quarterback. His arm strength was a real limitation in Whisenhunt’s vertical system, not a media narrative. His 70.8 career passer rating and 14-to-20 TD-to-INT ratio are what they are. No amount of scheme talk erases those numbers.
But Whisenhunt’s role in the failure gets undersold. Leinart spent his only functional starting season – 2006 – in an offense built around his strengths. Then a new coach arrived, changed the system entirely, and gave the job to a 36-year-old who thrived in that particular scheme. Leinart was never Whisenhunt’s guy. He said so directly in later interviews. A coaching staff that has already decided you’re not their quarterback will find confirmation of that belief in every preseason series, every third-and-long, every intercepted deep ball. By 2008, the outcome was predetermined regardless of what Leinart did in camp.
Compare him to Tim Couch, who went first overall to Cleveland in 1999 and finished with a 75.1 career passer rating behind one of the worst offensive lines in the league. Or Blaine Gabbert, 10th overall to Jacksonville in 2011, a team that went 5-11 and 2-14 in his first two seasons. Leinart had Fitzgerald and Boldin. He had a functioning defense in 2007 and 2008. The circumstances were better than most busts get. That matters when you’re trying to account for the gap between USC and Arizona.
The Cardinals’ Quarterback Problem Didn’t End With Him
After Leinart, the Cardinals used Anderson, Hall, Skelton, John Skelton again, Kevin Kolb (who cost them Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and a second-round pick in a 2011 trade), Drew Stanton, Carson Palmer, and Blaine Gabbert before Kyler Murray arrived in 2019 as the first overall pick. Murray won the 2019 AP Offensive Rookie of the Year award and made the Pro Bowl in 2020. He was another Heisman winner. So was Leinart. The comparison doesn’t flatter the earlier pick, though Murray had the benefit of playing for Kliff Kingsbury, who built his offense specifically around what Murray could do.
The decade between Leinart’s release and Murray’s arrival produced some genuinely dismal quarterback football in Arizona. Palmer had two productive seasons in 2015 and 2016 before injuries finished him. Everyone else was a stopgap. The organization had one great quarterback in that window – Warner, who they hadn’t drafted and who retired on his own terms after the Super Bowl run. The Leinart failure didn’t teach the Cardinals how to develop a quarterback. It just left them searching for the next one for ten years.
Leinart was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in December 2017. His NFL career ended without a single Pro Bowl appearance, without a playoff start, without the franchise-defining moment Arizona had drafted him to deliver. He threw for 4,065 yards across 33 professional games. Kurt Warner, the 36-year-old backup Leinart was supposed to replace, threw for 9,284 yards and 93 touchdowns in the two seasons after Leinart lost the starting job and took the Cardinals to a Super Bowl.
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