NFL Network’s Kurt Warner Talks Herbert, Penix, Wentz & More

Kurt Warner arrived fresh off having his number 13 retired at Northern Iowa, an honor he got around to after the Pro Football Hall of Fame rather than before it.

He was gracious about the sequencing.

"I didn't accomplish quite as much in college as a lot of guys," Warner said. "But when you think about college, so much of it is you don't come here as a finished product. It's about preparing you for what you can do after you leave here."

Colleen wanted to know where a person stores all of this. A compound, perhaps.

"Well, we have a garage."

His wife, it turns out, quietly relocates most of it. A few things live in one of his offices. The rest of the house is given over to her metal art, on the reasonable grounds that nobody should have to live inside a Kurt Warner shrine.

Onto the football, where Warner's biggest Week 1 surprise was the Chargers and Cardinals.

Arizona was not the shock, exactly. Warner thought they had weapons and could be competitive on offense. What surprised him was the defense, which he had real questions about and which controlled the game.

The flip side is the story.

"There was so much expectation for this Chargers team. Mike McDaniel coming in and how he's going to unlock Justin Herbert, and Justin Herbert's going to unlock Mike McDaniel and his offense."

So much unlocking, as Colleen put it.

Warner had concerns going in, and they were specific rather than vague. Watching McDaniel's offense in Miami, he thought Tua was the perfect quarterback for it.

"It was very much an anticipation type offense where you're really throwing to windows, as opposed to reading defenders and, hey, if this guy's not open, that guy's open. It's about getting back, hitting that back foot, being able to recognize that stuff and get the ball out on time."

That is not who Herbert has been across his career. Warner expected a process, and he has a second question layered underneath the first, which is whether the offense actually plays to the quarterback's skill set at all, and whether the quarterback plays to the offense's.

"It didn't show up in Week 1. It's something I'm going to keep my eye on."

Colleen added the part nobody in Los Angeles can escape, which is that the offensive line has been the Chargers' guaranteed annual problem since roughly the dawn of time. Her prediction is that Herbert finishes the year with a career high in rushing yards purely out of self-preservation.

Atlanta was next, where Kevin Stefanski still has not named a Week 2 starter against Carolina. The show played his answer.

"We will have a quarterback. Yes. I'd say we're working through it. I'm not ruling anyone out. Tua is not going to practice today, but he's getting better. Cooper and Mike will practice today, so we'll work through it."

Warner's read is that this is less indecision than a countdown.

"Michael Penix to me has to become the starter sooner rather than later. You've got to figure out, do you believe he can be the guy you drafted him to be? And we have to know that."

The timeline is set by something already decided. Warner does not believe Tua will be there next season.

"They're just not going to sign him to a starting quarterback contract, after the history that he's had and obviously what we saw last week. Starter, and then gets hurt. It's just not going to happen."

Which means every week Penix does not play is a week of information Atlanta does not get.

So Warner translates the coach speak this way. If Penix is ready, he starts. If the injury says he cannot go yet, they work through the other two and ask again next week.

"Nothing else really makes sense to me in this situation. You're trying to figure out that position for the long haul, and the only true option here of those three guys is going to be Michael Penix."

Colleen supplied the complicating detail. This is Penix's third ACL reconstruction, which makes the mental component enormous.

She also had the numbers on the alternative. Cooper Rush did not complete a pass when pressured, struggled badly whenever he held the ball longer than two and a half seconds, and finished six of 14 for 83 yards with two interceptions.

Then she raised the scheduling wrinkle. Atlanta plays on Thursday night in Week 3. Even if Penix is ready, is that the spot you want for his return?

Warner turned it around, and it might be the most useful thing he said.

"Maybe it's, hey, we're thinking about playing him this week, but we don't want him to turn around and have to play on a short week. So maybe we go with one of those other guys this week, and maybe it is Thursday night where you make that debut, and then he's got 10 days until the next game to recover and see where that knee is."

On to Minnesota, and the other Kevin. Kyler Murray went down early and is in concussion protocol. Carson Wentz played well, and he draws a Chicago team that just allowed 361 passing yards to Bryce Young.

Warner sees a familiar predicament. The Vikings brought Murray in to find out whether he could be the guy, not just this season, with the possibility of paying him and moving forward.

As for Wentz, Warner was blunt and not unkind.

"Carson is what Carson is at this point, and Minnesota has seen it. He's a guy that can definitely come in and make some plays for you. There's going to be some inconsistencies, there's going to be some mistakes along the way."

The job then becomes building a game plan that survives those mistakes, which Minnesota managed last week, though Warner noted they were down big and caught a pile of late breaks. Wentz did make big time plays.

The real question is the one standing behind both of them.

"The bottom line with J.J. to me is, next time you put him in is going to be what you determine the future on."

If McCarthy goes in and does not succeed, Warner believes the organization is almost forced to move on, because it becomes very hard for a team and a fan base to get behind a quarterback who has had two chances and has not shown it.

That is what makes the next few weeks delicate. If Wentz wins, the decision never arrives. If Murray is out a while and Minnesota is struggling, someone has to decide whether McCarthy is truly ready.

"I think he was thrown in last year before he was ready, and it showed that way. You don't want to do that again if you've got hopes of this guy being on your roster for the long term."

Warner was in Kansas City for the opener, which gave him a close look at Patrick Mahomes nine months removed from injury. He also had a conversation with him beforehand that explains the whole performance.

"He just said, I've done everything except get hit."

Warner's point is that this is not a throwaway line. Getting hit, getting hit in certain ways, moving afterward, and then doing the things you used to do, like going for a touchdown and diving between defenders, is its own hurdle.

"As cool a customer as he is, there was some nervousness and some anxiousness about, okay, where am I really for a real game?"

The movement looked fairly decent, better than you could reasonably expect. The throwing did not. Mahomes started around two of 12 before settling in and making some throws, and even then looked a little off.

Warner considers all of that entirely predictable. What excites him is what covered for it.

"The beautiful thing is we saw the emergence of a run game and Kenneth Walker III, who looked incredible."

He admits he doubted this part. Warner questioned whether Andy Reid would genuinely commit to the run after signing Walker, because it is not really what Reid does. Then Kansas City opened the game with five or six straight carries.

"I loved that part of it. If you have that, you can allow Patrick Mahomes to come along, and you can allow him to struggle and not be fully comfortable for a few weeks."

For a team that missed the playoffs last season, dominating a game without its quarterback at full strength is a genuinely good sign.

Colleen then brought up the strangest coaching decision of the week, which is John Harbaugh tackling Malik Nabers to get him past the mental hurdle of returning from a torn ACL. What would Warner make of Andy Reid trying that?

"A little more weight from Andy coming than Coach Harbaugh," Warner said.

But he gets it, and his answer tied directly back to the Mahomes conversation. Even a quarterback who is not coming off an injury wants that first hit out of the way.

"You want to know that you can take that hit, you can bounce up, and you can move on."

What he is really describing is a safety issue. A tentative player is a player thinking instead of playing.

"The one thing you don't want a player to do is play slower, play tentative when they're out there, because I often feel that's when guys get hurt."

He praised Harbaugh for having that kind of pulse on his team, and noted that whatever the method, the Giants looked ready on Sunday night.

Houston was next, and C.J. Stroud's turnovers against Buffalo, which arrived at the worst possible moments including a potential game winning drive, in a contract year.

Warner traced the arc honestly. Protecting the football was one of the things Stroud did best as a rookie. Over the last couple of seasons the turnovers crept in, specifically in the playoffs, and now here.

What makes it hard is that the talent is not in question.

"If you watch him in practice every day, he is physically talented. He is a gifted, gifted thrower. So everything you see says franchise quarterback, sign him to a big deal."

The counterweight is production in the moments that decide things.

"Somebody that we can believe we can put the ball in your hands in games like that, when our defense gives up 30 points. We don't expect it very often, but it happened. We go on the road in the playoffs and we put the ball in your hands, and you've got to be able to win games for us. That's what the franchise quarterback has to do."

The financial stakes make the evaluation unforgiving. Paying that position 60 or 65 million dollars limits what a team can do with the rest of its roster, which is why Warner keeps seeing this same story play out with quarterbacks who signed big deals and did not deliver the consistency.

He suspects Houston signs him anyway because of the talent. He just thinks organizations need to know before they write that check.

The last question was the fun one. Who played better than Warner expected?

His top four quarterbacks of the week were Trevor Lawrence, Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen and Caleb Williams, all of whom he expected to play well. So they do not count.

"My fifth is the guy that probably unexpected how well he played, and that was Jaxson Dart. I thought he played unbelievable."

The reason is what he used to see. As a rookie, Dart was often unsure in the pocket and wanted to solve problems as an athlete, running around and creating rather than reading it and getting the ball out.

Sunday night was the opposite.

"I thought they had a great plan for him, but he was definitive with his reads. He got back, he threw the ball extremely well, made some great reads."

Warner even preempted the obvious objection, which is that Dallas blew assignments.

"So what? You still have to see it, read it, and make those plays as a quarterback."

Of everybody in the league, Dart surprised him most.