With strong indications that Arizona Cardinals quarterback might be announcing his retirement earlier today, all eyes will be turning to Matt Leinart. Some people forget that Warner was brought to Arizona in 2005 to be Leinart’s backup, but the Southern Cal product was too busy banging Paris Hilton (allegedly) and allowed Warner to eventually play him out of a job.

With that in mind, it’s interesting that many people wonder if Leinart, entering his fifth season as a pro, is ready to get behind the wheel of the Cardinals offense. His coaches don’t trust him, nor do his receivers. In six appearances this season, Leinart threw three picks. That’s hardly an adequate sampling, but it does nothing to alleviate the Cardinals’ concerns.

Personally, as a blogger, I’m ready for Leinart’s sexual exploits to become front-page tabloid fodder again. Kurt Warner and his Jesus love are pretty boring, plus Warner’s wife is looking a lot better now, so ripping on her is out. Here’s hoping that Leinart can just hang onto the job long enough to crash and burn over the balance of a full season. I’m just rooting for chaos. And maybe syphilis. Syphilis and chaos.

Here’s Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner appearing with Brenda Song in a promotional photo from this week’s Entertainment Weekly for The Suite Life which is either some series on the Disney Channel or a reality show about a Taiwanese brother on the Discovery Channel. Hey, it was either that or have shark week ten times a year, and honestly it kinda loses its luster after, uh, the first day. But that’s just our nature, I suppose. We love things that are capable of imposing such inhumane levels of death in the water. That’s probably why everyone loved Ted Kennedy…

God’s Quarterback (sorry, Kitna) just co-wrote a new book with his wife called First Things First: The Rules of Being a Warner, and it sounds like Rule No. 1 is the same as it is in every family: Father Gets Hosed. From NBC New York (via Tunison):

As the book unfolds, it becomes clear the the QB struggles at home: Warner had to offer one of his sons a quarter for every completed pass so that he’d agree to a game of catch in the backyard. He can’t even get them to agree to come to watch him play in the Super Bowl. Two skipped the game in February, and there was a good bit of tooth pulling involved to get the other five to show up for the game. What’s watching your dad play in a Super Bowl next to a Nintendo DS?

What a great family.

“Hey Dad, how was work?”
“We won the Super Bowl on a last-second play against Tennessee! It’s the greatest day I ever could have hoped for!”
“That’s nice. Can I have the car this weekend?”

Kids these days.

Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez and Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner both led their teams to surprising postseason prominence. Both were offered sub-par contracts in the offseason, and while Warner did his best to appear that he was really entertaining an offer from the 49ers, Manny was Manny and entertained himself. And today, both signed with their original teams, for nearly-original money.

Quarterback Kurt Warner agreed to terms on a two-year, $23-million contract with the Arizona Cardinals…The agreement came after he lowered his demands Tuesday. Initially, he had sought to be among the top five paid quarterbacks in the NFL, about $14.5 million a year. But on Tuesday, he told agent Mark Bartelstein to offer Arizona a two-year, $23 million deal. The Cardinals initially had offered two years and $20 million. [AP]

If there was good-natured hubris from Ramírez… it dissipated over the next four months when the market for him sank — just like the price of gas. That was clear Wednesday when Ramírez agreed to a two-year, $45 million contract with the Dodgers, pending a physical. They were the only serious suitor Ramírez’s agent, Scott Boras, ever found. [NY Times]

It’s like when you go on a break with your girlfriend thinking, “I can do better than this,” and then you get out there and nobody really seems interested [Manny] or there’s this one girl who is interested [Kurt], but you’ve already moved in with the other girl and you don’t feel like packing up all your crap and things aren’t really that bad. Must be nice to look around and say, “Hmm, yeah, I guess I’ll take your 23 million.” In closing, relationships are totally pointless unless you’re a prostitute.

Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner is well-known to praise his Lord and Savior every time he opens his mouth, and that’s fine with me. We’re all entitled to our beliefs, and he’s not hurting anyone by giving big ups to God. But I have to admit, this video of Warner drawing what he thinks God looks like is one of the more awkward things I’ve seen in a while. Apparently, Kurt messed up drawing God, so he says it’s Jesus instead, and of course God and Jesus are two different entities, except, uh, the same. And one of those entities looks like Charles Manson on heroin.

Below is an LSUfreek .gif that has made me laugh at least five times today. Huge thanks to flubby at Kissing Suzy Kolber for finding this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sources have told ESPN's Chris Mortensen that Matt Leinart will start for the Arizona Cardinals beginning next week. Right. "Sources". Sources is a nice way of saying "Dennis Green told me off the record, because he hasn't broken the news to Kurt Warner yet."

Jeez, Kurt Warner. I know he was due to lose his job sometime this year, but I figured it would be from an injury, and not until Week 6. But yeah, you don't make a case for remaining the starter when you throw three INT's (two in the red zome) in a game you lose by two points. And the game-losing fumble on a snap in field goal territory didn't win him any friends. That makes 8 fumbles in three games, I think. It was hard to count them all because they happened so frequently. Even Daunte Culpepper's watching SportsCenter and saying, "Wow, this guy can't hold on to the ball." And Dave Krieg's like, "Seriously, are his hands smaller than mine?" And Jim Abbott's wondering why he became a pitcher instead of a quarterback.

Anyway, good luck to Matt Leinart. A lot of people say he'll never be a good NFL quarterback because his arm isn't strong enough or because he has too many girlfriends or because of his Hollywood looks. But they said that about me, too, and I made it. So I'm pulling for him. We're practically the same person.

What's that? He impregnated his ex-girlfriend after breaking up with her, slept with Paris Hilton, and is friends with Nick Lachey? Wow. Nevemind what I said. I could never be friends with Nick Lachey.

Note: That's Matt with Kristin Cavallari from that MTV reality show that feels too staged to be about real people but too poorly acted to be entirely scripted. I would drink a gallon of her pee just to see where it came from.