Former Arizona Cardinals and Houston Texans quarterback Matt Leinart made an appearance the on “Mason and Ireland” show on ESPN Radio Los Angeles. He was asked about being labeled a bust at this point in his career.
“I’ve heard everything. I’ve heard everything. I’ve seen everything. For me I haven’t proven anything, so I haven’t proven that I could play game in and game out. I understand that. I believe I can play and I’m not one to make excuses. I’ve never made an excuse with my time in Arizona. It just didn’t work out for whatever reason. Those are reasons people outside of the organization won’t understand, but it didn’t work out and it wasn’t a right fit, so you move on. You kind of look at the timeline of what has happened to me and with having a pretty good rookie year and the second year getting the injury and Kurt Warner played himself into the Hall of Fame in the last 3 years. There’s not a lot I can do about that. I battled with a Hall of Famer two training camps in a row. I thought I competed as well as he did and obviously Kurt was a great player. He took us to a Super Bowl. I truly believe he got himself into the Hall of Fame those last couple of years. Last year with everything that happened it just didn’t work out. I said what I said about the situation and I moved on, so there’s people thought I never got a fair shot. People that think I can’t play. There’s a lot of things. For me I’ve worked hard this off-season and I’m always work hard. I’m always ready. I’m always prepared and like I said it’s just always about being a quarterback, but being the right situation. For me hopefully that situation comes up this year and I can thrive and show I belong in the league and I can play because I know I can and that’s what I plan on doing.”
I agree with Leinart that it was a bit unfair that he had to compete for a starting job with a future hall of fame quarterback in Kurt Warner. But lets be honest, if the Arizona Cardinals had believed that he was a good quarterback, he’d still be in Arizona. It’s not that he lost the starting job to Warner. It’s that he was given the starting job and played himself out of it. When head coach Ken Wisenhunt came to Arizona he gave Leinart plenty of opportunities to be the Cardinals’ starter. But in order to win games Wisenhunt was forced to bench Leinart and start Warner. And look at what happened, the Cardinals went to the Super Bowl with Warner as their signal caller, not Leinart.
Leinart is currently a free agent and it will be interesting to see if any team decides to sign him once the lockout is over.
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