This week marks the dawn of the Matt Leinart era in Arizona, as the team's No. 1 pick and former Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback makes his much-anticipated NFL starting debut at home against the Chiefs.
It may well coincide with another significant line of demarcation -- the beginning of Arizona head coach Dennis Green's final 12-game window of opportunity to prove he can indeed produce the Cardinals turnaround he was hired to execute almost three years ago.
That's irony for you, because in his largely successful 13-year NFL coaching career, Green almost always has preferred to cast his lot with veteran quarterbacks, such as Rich Gannon, Jim McMahon, Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham and Jeff George in Minnesota, and Kurt Warner in Arizona. But now, at such a crucial juncture in the desert, his coaching fate likely rests in the hands of a rookie passer who has appeared in all of one NFL game, last week's 32-10 loss at Atlanta.
Make that irony brought on by desperation, and a healthy dose of exasperation. I've known Green since I began covering his Vikings team in 1996, and I can't ever recall seeing him as frustrated or as bewildered as he has looked and sounded after each of the Cardinals' past two defeats, 16-14 at home against St. Louis in Week 3, and the Week 4 blowout at Atlanta -- losses that gave Green no choice but to bench the turnover-plagued Warner and toss the ball to Leinart.
"I get the feeling that some days the frustration is unbearable,'' said one league source who knows Green. "He's extremely frustrated, because he can't get everybody on the same page. He doesn't have 53 guys with the same goal right now. He's got too many guys who still accept losing; that's a big part of it. I think he really believed he had a good enough team to make the playoffs. But so far, that doesn't appear to be the case.''
So why not turn to Leinart? At this point, what does Green have to lose? He may be coaching for his job these last three months of the season anyway. Expected by some to finally contend in the not-so-tough NFC West, with a new state-of-the-art stadium open for business in suburban Glendale, an unheard-of-for-Arizona sellout of season tickets and the addition of star free-agent running back Edgerrin James this offseason, Green's Cardinals thought it was their time to win.
Apparently they were misinformed. Arizona has started 1-3 in all three of Green's seasons, and for the second year in a row the Cardinals' only win in the first quarter of their schedule was a home-field defeat of division doormat San Francisco. Green is now 12-24 (.333) in his 36-game tenure with the Cardinals, and they've spent only one week above .500 in that span, at 1-0 after beating the 49ers in this year's opener.
Under Green, Arizona is 3-15 on the road and 6-9 in the division -- three of those wins came against the sad-sack 49ers -- with nary a notable win to his credit. His 6-10 debut season of 2004 was only the second double-digit loss season in his 11 years of NFL head coaching, and he promptly followed it up with his third last year, when the Cardinals regressed to 5-11.
Suffice it to say there hasn't been this much hype leading to dashed hopes in the desert since Buddy Ryan blew through town in 1994-95, going 12-20 but looking very snappy in that Panama hat. Like Ryan, Green arrived with an air of confidence and a résumé replete with playoff credentials. His Vikings made eight trips to the postseason in his 10 years in Minnesota, winning four division titles and playing in two NFC title games.
He had won the Big Ten's coach of the year award at Northwestern, took Stanford to a bowl game and qualified for the playoffs in each of his first three seasons in Minnesota (1992-94). Turnarounds were his forte, and his 101-70 (.591) 10-year record with the Vikings gave him all the cred he needed with the Cardinals, who haven't had a coach leave their employ with a winning record since Don Coryell wrapped up his 1973-77 stint at 42-29-1, with two division titles.
"I don't necessarily believe the next 12 games are it for [Green], but what's really important is how they play, how they look,'' said former Vikings receiver Cris Carter, who played 10 years for Green and is now a commentator on HBO's Inside the NFL. "The next 12 games are a barometer for that franchise. But if they do fire Denny, how much different will anything be if he's out of there? What will really change about the Cardinals?''
Green regrets not making more changes upon arriving in Arizona in January 2004. The Cardinals have been to the playoffs in a full season once (1998) in the past 30 years, and Green's greatest struggle has been to change the culture of losing that pervades the Arizona locker room.
"If he could have done things over again, he would have blown up the whole thing, the entire roster, right when he got there,'' said the league source familiar with Green. "The problem is their new players are becoming like their old players, used to losing. He should have blown it up and started over. But in some cases he didn't have any better alternatives than the guys on hand.''
Carter, who still stays in contact with his old coach, concurs.
"Where Denny went wrong is initially when he went in there he should have gotten everything his way,'' Carter said this week. "In talking to him, there were a certain number of his players on his roster who he just didn't know much they loved the game. He has a big problem with that. In Minnesota we had guys who loved to play, and if they didn't, they weren't there long. But it would have been hard to get rid of the number of [Cardinals] he should have gotten rid of.''
Until this week, Green had been maddeningly loyal to Warner, the two-time league MVP who is five years removed from his last great season, in 2001 with the Rams. It's hard to have a winning team in the NFL without a quarterback who takes care of the football, and in recent years Warner has become as sloppy as they come in that department. In the first four games of the season, Warner threw five interceptions and had a whopping 10 of Arizona's league-high 12 fumbles, losing three. Throw in his 12 sacks and the negative plays were far too plentiful.
"For three weeks it has been the same issue, Kurt Warner being so careless with the football,'' said the league source. "That's what lost them the last three games.''
That's where Leinart comes in, but if the Cardinals can't shore up their other longstanding weakness -- an ineffective offensive line -- Leinart's results may be similar to Warner's. Putting James in the backfield got all the headlines this offseason, but Arizona's No. 32-ranked running game from last year has only improved to 31st this season (70.2 yards per game) due to the Cardinals' continued lack of production up front.
Arizona's underachievement is personified by 6-foot-6, 366-pound left tackle Leonard Davis, the No. 2 overall pick in 2001 behind only Michael Vick, but a hugely unreliable performer at both guard and tackle in his six-year NFL career. Green has been unable to motivate Davis and maximize his talents, and thus far the addition of veteran offensive line coach Steve Loney has made no appreciable difference this year.
"I don't care who you have in those skill positions, and Arizona has great skill players -- if you don't have the guys up front, you don't go anywhere,'' said former Vikings running back Robert Smith, who played for Green his entire eight-year NFL career. "Who in the NFL is better at finding creases than Edgerrin James? If he can't find them, the holes are not there.''
Smith, who now serves as an ESPN college football analyst, is wary of the notion that Leinart will be able to make a quick impact playing behind the Cardinals' porous offensive line. Makes sense. Why should his experience be that much different from Warner's and James'?
"This could be a very ugly learning curve for him,'' Smith said. "He's always had a great line to play behind at USC, and he's never faced this situation before, where he's coming in to save a team. It's going to be tough. I don't know that his mobility is such that's he's going to be able to save their season. I don't know if the offensive line can keep the pressure off him long enough to make a difference. It doesn't matter if he can read a defense if he's getting sacked.''
But if Leinart can simply not turn the ball over three times a game, he'll give the Cardinals a shot to win some of the games that they've found ways to fumble away in recent weeks. It's that kind of turnaround on the turnover front that has Green willing to place his trust in a rookie quarterback for a change.
"I think he's playing Leinart because he thinks he's better, and the rookie gives him a chance to not turn the ball over so much,'' the league source said. "That defense had pretty much had enough of Warner's turnovers. It's pretty embarrassing the way Warner has played. You can't roll him out there anymore and keep watching the same thing happen, or you will lose that defense.''
As Smith recalls, there were skeptics in Minnesota's locker room when Green decided to go with Daunte Culpepper as his starter in 2000, after the 1999 first-round pick sat and watched behind both George and Cunningham as a rookie. But that gamble paid off with the Vikings going 11-5 and reaching the NFC title game that season, and Smith sees some echoes of the move in Green's switching to Leinart.
"We all thought he was wrong about Daunte,'' Smith said. "We used to laugh watching him run the two-minute drill as a rookie. It was terrible. So the next year, we were like, 'What the hell is this guy [Green] doing?'
But while putting in Leinart may be emotionally tough for Denny, it's going to be a boost for the team.
"The players are going to say, 'Denny's rolling the dice and putting his job on the line for us here.' He's doing something that may jeopardize his career there, but it's ultimately best for the team in the long run. I think the team will sense that and respond to that.''
And there's always the nowhere-to-go-but-up theory, which the Cardinals are eminently familiar with. They hope it works for Green and Leinart.
"How much playing Leinart matters with an offensive line that ... I don't know how much difference that will make,'' Smith said. "One thing [Leinart] has got going for him is, it's going to be hard to look worse.''
Then again, these are the Cardinals. They've always managed it before.
******
Link: http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=cnnsi-greenslaststand&prov=cnnsi&type=lgns
The Shark
It may well coincide with another significant line of demarcation -- the beginning of Arizona head coach Dennis Green's final 12-game window of opportunity to prove he can indeed produce the Cardinals turnaround he was hired to execute almost three years ago.
That's irony for you, because in his largely successful 13-year NFL coaching career, Green almost always has preferred to cast his lot with veteran quarterbacks, such as Rich Gannon, Jim McMahon, Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham and Jeff George in Minnesota, and Kurt Warner in Arizona. But now, at such a crucial juncture in the desert, his coaching fate likely rests in the hands of a rookie passer who has appeared in all of one NFL game, last week's 32-10 loss at Atlanta.
Make that irony brought on by desperation, and a healthy dose of exasperation. I've known Green since I began covering his Vikings team in 1996, and I can't ever recall seeing him as frustrated or as bewildered as he has looked and sounded after each of the Cardinals' past two defeats, 16-14 at home against St. Louis in Week 3, and the Week 4 blowout at Atlanta -- losses that gave Green no choice but to bench the turnover-plagued Warner and toss the ball to Leinart.
"I get the feeling that some days the frustration is unbearable,'' said one league source who knows Green. "He's extremely frustrated, because he can't get everybody on the same page. He doesn't have 53 guys with the same goal right now. He's got too many guys who still accept losing; that's a big part of it. I think he really believed he had a good enough team to make the playoffs. But so far, that doesn't appear to be the case.''
So why not turn to Leinart? At this point, what does Green have to lose? He may be coaching for his job these last three months of the season anyway. Expected by some to finally contend in the not-so-tough NFC West, with a new state-of-the-art stadium open for business in suburban Glendale, an unheard-of-for-Arizona sellout of season tickets and the addition of star free-agent running back Edgerrin James this offseason, Green's Cardinals thought it was their time to win.
Apparently they were misinformed. Arizona has started 1-3 in all three of Green's seasons, and for the second year in a row the Cardinals' only win in the first quarter of their schedule was a home-field defeat of division doormat San Francisco. Green is now 12-24 (.333) in his 36-game tenure with the Cardinals, and they've spent only one week above .500 in that span, at 1-0 after beating the 49ers in this year's opener.
Under Green, Arizona is 3-15 on the road and 6-9 in the division -- three of those wins came against the sad-sack 49ers -- with nary a notable win to his credit. His 6-10 debut season of 2004 was only the second double-digit loss season in his 11 years of NFL head coaching, and he promptly followed it up with his third last year, when the Cardinals regressed to 5-11.
Suffice it to say there hasn't been this much hype leading to dashed hopes in the desert since Buddy Ryan blew through town in 1994-95, going 12-20 but looking very snappy in that Panama hat. Like Ryan, Green arrived with an air of confidence and a résumé replete with playoff credentials. His Vikings made eight trips to the postseason in his 10 years in Minnesota, winning four division titles and playing in two NFC title games.
He had won the Big Ten's coach of the year award at Northwestern, took Stanford to a bowl game and qualified for the playoffs in each of his first three seasons in Minnesota (1992-94). Turnarounds were his forte, and his 101-70 (.591) 10-year record with the Vikings gave him all the cred he needed with the Cardinals, who haven't had a coach leave their employ with a winning record since Don Coryell wrapped up his 1973-77 stint at 42-29-1, with two division titles.
"I don't necessarily believe the next 12 games are it for [Green], but what's really important is how they play, how they look,'' said former Vikings receiver Cris Carter, who played 10 years for Green and is now a commentator on HBO's Inside the NFL. "The next 12 games are a barometer for that franchise. But if they do fire Denny, how much different will anything be if he's out of there? What will really change about the Cardinals?''
Green regrets not making more changes upon arriving in Arizona in January 2004. The Cardinals have been to the playoffs in a full season once (1998) in the past 30 years, and Green's greatest struggle has been to change the culture of losing that pervades the Arizona locker room.
"If he could have done things over again, he would have blown up the whole thing, the entire roster, right when he got there,'' said the league source familiar with Green. "The problem is their new players are becoming like their old players, used to losing. He should have blown it up and started over. But in some cases he didn't have any better alternatives than the guys on hand.''
Carter, who still stays in contact with his old coach, concurs.
"Where Denny went wrong is initially when he went in there he should have gotten everything his way,'' Carter said this week. "In talking to him, there were a certain number of his players on his roster who he just didn't know much they loved the game. He has a big problem with that. In Minnesota we had guys who loved to play, and if they didn't, they weren't there long. But it would have been hard to get rid of the number of [Cardinals] he should have gotten rid of.''
Until this week, Green had been maddeningly loyal to Warner, the two-time league MVP who is five years removed from his last great season, in 2001 with the Rams. It's hard to have a winning team in the NFL without a quarterback who takes care of the football, and in recent years Warner has become as sloppy as they come in that department. In the first four games of the season, Warner threw five interceptions and had a whopping 10 of Arizona's league-high 12 fumbles, losing three. Throw in his 12 sacks and the negative plays were far too plentiful.
"For three weeks it has been the same issue, Kurt Warner being so careless with the football,'' said the league source. "That's what lost them the last three games.''
That's where Leinart comes in, but if the Cardinals can't shore up their other longstanding weakness -- an ineffective offensive line -- Leinart's results may be similar to Warner's. Putting James in the backfield got all the headlines this offseason, but Arizona's No. 32-ranked running game from last year has only improved to 31st this season (70.2 yards per game) due to the Cardinals' continued lack of production up front.
Arizona's underachievement is personified by 6-foot-6, 366-pound left tackle Leonard Davis, the No. 2 overall pick in 2001 behind only Michael Vick, but a hugely unreliable performer at both guard and tackle in his six-year NFL career. Green has been unable to motivate Davis and maximize his talents, and thus far the addition of veteran offensive line coach Steve Loney has made no appreciable difference this year.
"I don't care who you have in those skill positions, and Arizona has great skill players -- if you don't have the guys up front, you don't go anywhere,'' said former Vikings running back Robert Smith, who played for Green his entire eight-year NFL career. "Who in the NFL is better at finding creases than Edgerrin James? If he can't find them, the holes are not there.''
Smith, who now serves as an ESPN college football analyst, is wary of the notion that Leinart will be able to make a quick impact playing behind the Cardinals' porous offensive line. Makes sense. Why should his experience be that much different from Warner's and James'?
"This could be a very ugly learning curve for him,'' Smith said. "He's always had a great line to play behind at USC, and he's never faced this situation before, where he's coming in to save a team. It's going to be tough. I don't know that his mobility is such that's he's going to be able to save their season. I don't know if the offensive line can keep the pressure off him long enough to make a difference. It doesn't matter if he can read a defense if he's getting sacked.''
But if Leinart can simply not turn the ball over three times a game, he'll give the Cardinals a shot to win some of the games that they've found ways to fumble away in recent weeks. It's that kind of turnaround on the turnover front that has Green willing to place his trust in a rookie quarterback for a change.
"I think he's playing Leinart because he thinks he's better, and the rookie gives him a chance to not turn the ball over so much,'' the league source said. "That defense had pretty much had enough of Warner's turnovers. It's pretty embarrassing the way Warner has played. You can't roll him out there anymore and keep watching the same thing happen, or you will lose that defense.''
As Smith recalls, there were skeptics in Minnesota's locker room when Green decided to go with Daunte Culpepper as his starter in 2000, after the 1999 first-round pick sat and watched behind both George and Cunningham as a rookie. But that gamble paid off with the Vikings going 11-5 and reaching the NFC title game that season, and Smith sees some echoes of the move in Green's switching to Leinart.
"We all thought he was wrong about Daunte,'' Smith said. "We used to laugh watching him run the two-minute drill as a rookie. It was terrible. So the next year, we were like, 'What the hell is this guy [Green] doing?'
But while putting in Leinart may be emotionally tough for Denny, it's going to be a boost for the team.
"The players are going to say, 'Denny's rolling the dice and putting his job on the line for us here.' He's doing something that may jeopardize his career there, but it's ultimately best for the team in the long run. I think the team will sense that and respond to that.''
And there's always the nowhere-to-go-but-up theory, which the Cardinals are eminently familiar with. They hope it works for Green and Leinart.
"How much playing Leinart matters with an offensive line that ... I don't know how much difference that will make,'' Smith said. "One thing [Leinart] has got going for him is, it's going to be hard to look worse.''
Then again, these are the Cardinals. They've always managed it before.
******
Link: http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=cnnsi-greenslaststand&prov=cnnsi&type=lgns
The Shark
