The dawn of football season is like a jolt of amphetamines to the Cold, Hard Football Facts crew. We're going to crank it up 10-fold over the next six months, starting today and ending with yet another season proving that we lord over the seedy underworld of online gridiron analysis.
We're publishing a series of Icy Issues today and tomorrow, tackling the biggest questions with the toughest, most emotionless answers. We'll also have our predictions, and a look at the Redskins-Giants kickoff game, all by Thursday. It will get only better from there.
So sit back, enjoy the season, and bathe in the raw, chilly wisdom of the Cold, Hard Football Facts.
Icy Issue: Did Arizona make the right decision last week when they named aging Kurt Warner the starting quarterback over 2006 No. 1 draft pick Matt Leinart.
Icier Response: It's probably the smartest decision the franchise has made since the Chicago Cardinals re-hired head coach Jimmy Conzelman after World War II.
When you go 88 years with just two postseason victories (
not sure we've mentioned that before), the smart personnel decisions are so few and far between they remind us of rainy days in Phoenix.
In fact, we had to go all the way back to 1946 to find the last time an off-the-field decision really panned out for the Cardinals.
Conzelman is one of the true legends of the early NFL, a Hall of Fame player-coach for several teams who led the mighty Providence Steam Roller to the 1928 NFL title. He coached the Cardinals from 1940 to 1942, with limited success, before leaving, according to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, for a job in Major League Baseball.
The Cardinals brought him back to the NFL after the war and he led the organization to its greatest success: the Cardinals (then in Chicago) won their one and only NFL championship game in 1947. The organization has floated like the itinerant, dirt-poor Joad family along Route 66 in the days since then, first to St. Louis and then to Arizona – but the lack of success has remained consistent: The Cardinals have won just a single playoff game since 1947, and have never won another NFL championship.
Fast forward 61 years, and we finally have another decision worthy of excitement: the decision to start Kurt Warner over 2006 No. 1 draft pick Matt Leinart.
It's virtually a no brainer:
Warner is a two-time MVP and a Super Bowl champion. Leinart has played parts of just two seasons.
Warner is one of the most efficient passers in the history of football, third on
the all-time passer rating list (93.17), which puts him one spot
ahead of Tom Brady (92.93) and two spots
ahead of Joe Montana (92.26). Leinart is among the least efficient passers in the game today, with a 71.2 career passer rating, well below the average of about 80.0 of most modern passers.
Warner is one of the most productive passers in the history of football, fifth all-time on
the passing yards per attempt list (8.11 YPA) and second among modern passers, just a shade behind Ben Roethlisberger (8.13 YPA). Leinart is among the least productive passers in football, with an average of just 6.53 YPA.
Warner clearly gives the organization its best shot at another elusive postseason victory. In fact, he gave the organization its best shot last year.
The only question is why the Cardinals didn't make the obvious choice last year.
(Critics of the Cold, Hard Football Facts will say that we have a double standard. After all, we praised the Packers for choosing the unproven young guy, Aaron Rodgers, over the proven veteran, Brett Favre. Of course, critics of the Cold, Hard Football Facts always get pummeled ruthlessly. Here goes: the difference is that Warner never retired ... he never held the organization over a barrel by threatening to retire the three seasons before that. Plus, Warner is two years younger than Favre ... but we digress.)
The Cardinals struggled to an 8-8 finish in 2007, a pretty good season by the organization's lowly standards. They even won an impressive
three games against Quality Teams. Only the Patriots, Colts, Jaguars and Cowboys claimed more Quality Wins.
With the historically prolific Warner at the helm, with the Cardinals fresh off their best season in a decade, and with the NFC West perhaps the weakest group in the NFL, there's finally reason to believe that the Cardinals can win the division and capture just their second playoff win since the Conzelman Era.
It finally feels like football season. The exhibition games are over. College football has already kicked off. And Labor Day is over, which means that all you poor saps with "jobs" and "careers" have left the "second home on the beach" to return to work. 
