Cardinals All-Time Top 5 QBs: Hart Attacks and Late-Career Comebacks!
The Top 5 QBs series is back for its final installments! There are only four teams left to go, and Too Deep Zone promises to get to them before summer arrives. Fans of every team except the Rams, 49ers and Seahawks can find their team’s all-time quarterbacks feature in the archives. Cardinals fans: read on!
1. Jim Hart
You think: a quarterback in pro football; he grew up throwing a warped ball through a tire that swung from the big oak in his backyard, practicing for hours every afternoon; in high school he most likely was all-state or, at the absolute worst, all-city, and then 87 colleges tried to recruit him (maybe even The Bear or Darrell dropped around to see his family); there were two bowl games, one in Miami, the other in New Orleans, and an all-star game on a surfboard in Hawaii; he was drafted on the first round, naturally, and after signing his four-year, no-cut contract for $400,000 and two convertibles, he married the Homecoming Queen, or at least the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.
Now that you have the picture, forget about all that, please, and stop listening to those adult purists, Vince and Papa Bear and Allie, who insist it requires five years to develop a pro quarterback, because this is the new generation—not the hippies' kind or the flower power kids' kind—but the young movers' generation.
Jim Hart (see cover) is a young mover. He is the 23-year-old, baby-faced, slit-eyed ("Don't call me Chinaman") quarterback of the St. Louis Cardinals, who took over from Army-bound Charley Johnson this year and, despite all those dire things that have been said about boys in men's jobs, is one of the main reasons his boss, Coach Charley Winner, has been able to live up to his name. – Mark Mulvoy, Sports Illustrated, November 1967.
I’m a sucker for a purple, elegiac, problematic 1960s-style lede like that! (And I adore the fact that Mulvoy was sick of football cliches three full years before I was even born.)
Hart grew up outside of Chicago. He attended Southern Illinois, which was further below the scouting radar in the 1960s than it is today. He threw seven touchdowns and 23 interceptions in his final season. Remarkably, he went undrafted.
Hart earned a tryout with the St. Louis Cardinals and made the team as a third-stringer behind Charley Johnson and Terry Nofsinger, a former 17th-round pick of the Steelers. Hart was described as both scrawny and a little tubby, which certainly paints an image. Teammates called him Peach Fuzz.
Johnson was called up to serve in the military (we’ll get to this tale later) at the start of the 1967 season. The Cardinals had traded Nofsinger and failed in their efforts to land a veteran like Bill Munson or Gary Cuozzo. (This is the era of both the AFL and rapid expansion, so veteran quarterbacks were in short supply and great demand.) Hart became the Cardinals starter by default, even holding onto the job when Johnson was able to return for limited duty. Hart led the NFL with 30 interceptions in 1967, but the Cardinals went a respectable 6-7-1. The following year, they went 9-4-1. Hart and Johnson shared the starting job in 1969, then Johnson was traded to the Houston Oilers.
Hart and the Cardinals puttered through the early 1970s the way many second-rate franchises did in that era. They went 4-9-1 for three consecutive years from 1971 through 1973. But Don Coryell became the head coach in 1973. Coryell tinkered with the offense, and the Cardinals became the Cardiac Cards, a team known for stunning opponents with fourth-quarter “Hart Attacks.”
Sports Illustrated’s Dan Jenkins captured the spirit of the era in his description of the wild ending of a Cardinals overtime victory against Washington in November of 1975. The story opens with Washington leading 17-10 on fourth down at the six-yard line with 25 seconds left:
Hart drops back and the din in the stadium is indescribable as he fires the ball at Mel Gray, who is about a yard deep in the end zone and roughly two yards up in the air, perched there, as if suspended by wires. The ball meets his chest and arms, he has it, and now he's coming down, but here comes Washington's Pat Fischer to smack into Gray like the secondary ax murderer that he is. Gray and the ball go separate ways as all three crash to the rug.
The Cardinals are leaping around, reacting jubilantly to the touchdown, and the Redskins are leaping around, reacting jubilantly to the incompletion and the victory they believe they have won on Randy Johnson's touchdown passes to Charley Taylor and Mike Thomas and Mark Moseley's field goal, all of which came much earlier and were no longer pertinent.
Down on the field one official has signaled a touchdown, and another official has signaled an incompletion, and what appears to be a convention of red-jerseyed Cardinals and white-jerseyed Redskins—perhaps a thousand of them—is taking place. – Dan Jenkins, Sports Illustrated, November, 1975.
The officials eventually ruled that Gray was in the air with the ball for so long that he scored a touchdown, even though Fischer knocked the ball free just as he landed. And you think it’s hard to figure out what a catch is nowadays! Anyway, the Cardinals won in overtime, rose to 7-2 and eventually won the NFC East, losing to the Rams in the first round of the playoffs.
Hart earned Pro Bowl berths every year from 1974 through 1977. But the Cardinals went 7-7 in that final year after three straight winning seasons. Coryell began publicly criticizing management. Worse yet, he actively pursued a job with the Rams while still coaching the Cardinals; Coryell was a Southern California guy whose family was not happy in the Midwest.
Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill responded to Coryell’s treasonous behavior by locking the coach out of his office but refusing to fire him. Bidwill demanded a first-round pick from the Rams in exchange for Coryell’s services. When that failed, Bidwill dismissed Coryell in favor of Bud Wilkinson, a former Oklahoma coaching legend and failed politician who had spent the previous decade in the broadcast booth.
The Cardinals became irrelevant under Wilkinson and stayed that way for a long time. Hart held onto his starting job into the early 1980s. The Cardinals made no real effort to replace Hart, playing through his mid-30s on a perennial doormat, until they drafted Neil Lomax in 1982. Coryell clearly had a point about the team’s management.
Lomax supplanted Hart during the 1981 season. The Cardinals, surprisingly, held onto Hart for three more seasons, paying him starter’s money for much of that time.
A variety of scenarios had been envisioned since Lomax, a rookie, was made a starter in the 11th game of the 1981 season. Hart would be traded. Hart would be cut. Hart would be dangled into limbo by his thumbs. None of these pictures reflected favorably on the Cardinals, but the National Football League club has been known to do such things.
And Hart said, yes, he was mildly surprised that all the loose strings were tied. He also was a trifle stunned (flattered?) that a backup quarterback in St. Louis could demand his fee. – Tom Barnidge, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 24, 1982.
Hart retired third behind Fran Tarkenton and Johnny Unitas in all-time passing yards. He drifted into historical obscurity rather quickly, however: he played for mostly forgettable teams, the Cardinals soon moved out of St. Louis, and longer seasons and increased passing quickly made 1970s statistics look like ancient artifacts.
Hart generated little national buzz, even in his best years, and didn’t have a reputation as a ladies’ man, party animal or self-promoter in an era full of them. As a result, he’s a bit of an enigmatic character, even in his own tale. But he was very good for several years, and he’s a key figure in Coryell’s origin story.
2. Kurt Warner
Warner was three years removed from his last real success with the Rams and fresh from a stint as Eli Manning’s creaky mentor with the Giants when the Cardinals signed him to a one-year contract in 2005. Dennis Green named him the starter. Warner played well between groin and knee injuries, but the Cardinals were 2-8 in his starts. The Cardinals rewarded him with a three-year contract, then hedged their bets by drafting Matt Leinart.
Warner fumbled ten times in four starts early in the 2006 season, so Green switched to Leinart, who was bad-but-not-unplayable for the rest of the year.
Ken Whisenhunt replaced Green in 2007. Leinart started the first two games of the season and was ineffective, though not horrendous. Whisenhunt then hatched a hairbrained scheme: Leinart would remain the starter, but Warner would enter the game at various times to run an up-tempo package!