The circumstances were not good for Kurt Warner at the time.
Rookie Eli Manning was sitting on the bench, the New York Giants were running an offense that wasn’t the best fit, and then future teammate Bertrand Berry buried Warner for four sacks in a disappointing loss to the Cardinals at Sun Devil Stadium.
Warner never started for the Giants again in 2004, his lone season in New York. Manning, for better or (mostly) worse that season, was the Giants’ permanent quarterback. And Warner, in the offseason, signed with Arizona.
The Giants play the Cards in Arizona Sunday for the first time since that 2004 game. Manning is a Super Bowl winner. But Warner is an MVP candidate, with his demotion in New York only a memory.
“It’s always hard, especially when you feel you have a lot to offer,” Warner said. “It’s one of those situations where you feel like life isn’t fair. You feel like you were the best guy for the job, and I think most people there would admit I was probably the better quarterback at the time, but it was something they needed to do moving forward.“
“It’s something that obviously paid huge dividends, so it’s hard to fault them.”
Given that Warner was benched again with the Cardinals – early in the 2006
season, when he went through a déjà vu situation with Matt Leinart – Warner’s stint with the Giants was just another setback that needed to be overcome, nothing more.
Warner, sitting with 20 touchdown passes and only seven interceptions and an NFL-best 105.5 passer rating, never wavered in self-belief.
“That’s on everybody else to be surprised,”
Warner said. “I’m not surprised one bit with how I am playing.”
Giants coach Tom Coughlin said he isn’t surprised with how Warner’s season has unfolded. In fact, there is nothing but admiration between the coach and the quarterback he benched. Warner called the two “good friends” and praised Coughlin for treating him “like a man”
when the Giants made the change.
“He looked me in the eye and told me the truth,”
Warner said, which was simply that the Giants would be better served throwing Manning on the field and letting him learn on the fly.
Warner was 5-4 as a starter. Manning went 1-6.
The outside world was waiting to see how Warner would react. Even Warner could see that. The former two-time MVP had already been forced out in St. Louis and now he hadn’t even had a full season in New York before being replaced by unquestionably – at least, at the time – an inferior player.
Instead, Warner taught Manning what he could. Manning said that as a young player, he couldn’t have watched a better role model in terms of preparing, practicing and pointing out things on the sideline during a game.
“Kurt was always a great teammate,”
Manning said.
That’s what Coughlin remembers.
“Any competitor is not happy when you make a change,”
Coughlin said. “But the way he accepted it, the way he stood tall, the way he supported the young QB, the way he continued to work with him, (he) was a class act.”
Four seasons later, Warner has undergone a career renaissance. Beating his former team Sunday would get the Cardinals closer to a higher NFC playoff seed and possible first-round bye. His performance not only has him in MVP talk but has restarted discussion of Warner as a Hall of Fame candidate.
Those definitely weren’t the thoughts that mid-November day at Sun Devil Stadium, just before the Eli Manning era began for the Giants.
“We all go through things that aren’t fair or don’t go in our direction and there is only one way to respond,”
Warner said. “That is to press forward and work harder and persevere and come out the other side.“
“My whole life has seemed to be the highs and lows, ups and downs. I just think it is life.”
