Matt Leinart once dropped the ball in a major way. It wasn’t on the football field, though. It was with Rihanna.
Leinart appeared as a guest on The Dan Patrick Show on Wednesday and the show’s host had a little fun with him by making him talk about how he once blew a date with singing star.
Dan Patrick mentioned that Matt Leinart shares details about his life on his podcast and noted that he learned the former USC quarterback “screwed up the date with Rihanna.”
“Oh God, are we really going there?” Leinart responded with a grimace.
“Well, you brought it up,” Patrick replied. “I mean, you brought it up prior, and I was like, ‘How do you screw up a date with Rihanna?'”
“Well, [sighs] it just, you know, I wasn’t at my best,” Leinart said. “I definitely wasn’t at my best that day.
“I, actually, we were friends. We hung out a couple times. We had a a mutual circle of friends and um her assistant and sort of right-hand girl still to this day I’m friends with. She grew up with one of my best friends. So that was kind of the thing.
“But yeah, it was uh, it was a young Matt, just, you know, not super confident. You know, you’d have thought I would have had a lot of confidence. I didn’t. Um, and yeah, so that’s that.”
Here’s the original story that Dan Patrick was talking about from July 2025 on Matt Leinart’s podcast Throwbacks.
Luckily, everything seemed to work out pretty well relationship-wise for both Matt Leinart and Rihanna. He is married to Josie Loren, and they have four children together, including their oldest son, Cole, who is a freshman quarterback at SMU. Meanwhile, Rihanna has three kids with rapper A$AP Rocky.