via Netflix
Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young is on Netflix now, and you can’t tell Vince Young’s story without sticking Matt Leinart on the other sideline.
Rewind to January 4, 2006. Young’s Texas Longhorns and Leinart’s USC Trojans played for the national title in the Rose Bowl, and 20 years later it’s still the game people reach for when they argue about the greatest ever played. Leinart came in as the golden boy, the 2004 Heisman winner with the loaded USC résumé. Young came in with the swagger and, as it turned out, the better fourth quarter. Texas won 41-38. Young ran it into the corner with 19 seconds left, and Leinart stood there watching a perfect USC season end one stop short of National Championship glory.
The strange part is how much their stories rhymed after that. Both went in the top 10 of the 2006 NFL Draft, Young at No. 3, Leinart at No. 10. The pros humbled both of them in a hurry. Leinart lost his job to Kurt Warner, bounced through Houston, Oakland and Buffalo, and was out of the league by 30. Young infamously flamed out in Tennessee, despite his improvements as a quarterback, no thanks to a tumutulous relationship with Jeff Fisher that the documentary explores.
In a way, Young and Leinhart’s seemingly parallel paths are star-crossed. They were born a week apart in May 1983, they’re both in the College Football Hall of Fame, and they both got stamped with the same “bust” label on the way out of the NFL despite dominance in the college football national spotlight. One January night in Pasadena, under the lights, they were tied together for good.
When I got Young on the phone last week, I asked about Leinart, and his tone shifted. Twenty years after they battled for a Heisman Trophy, a national title, and top draft positioning, what came through was pure affection.
“We are brotherhood,” Young tells BroBible in an exclusive interview. “We stick together, we support each other, and it’s still like that today.”
Matt Leinart Didn’t Think Twice
Proof of this camaraderie played out just recently, before a single camera on this Netflix project rolled. When Young was putting the documentary together, he called Leinart and asked him to sit for it. Matt’s a busy guy these days, jetting around the country as a college football studio analyst for FOX Sports on Big Noon Kickoff, so he wasn’t sure what he’d say. Safe to say that reliving the worst night of his football life isn’t high on Leinart’s list of hobbies.
Au contraire… He said yes on the spot.
net”I asked him, ‘Hey man, if you don’t mind, can you be on the Netflix doc?'” Young said. “He was like, ‘Hands down, whatever you need, Vince.'”
Young knew what he was asking for.
“I know sometimes he don’t want to talk about it,” Young said. “But it’s just the respect he had for me, and the same thing that I have for him.”
The Quarterback Brotherhood
To Young, this is bigger than the two of them. Chalk it up to being a quarterback thing, the kind of IYKYK brotherhood that outlasts the final score of how a national championship title game shook out.
“If he calls me and wants me to come to a charity event, whatever it may be, I’m there to support him,” Young said. “We’re not really talking about the game.”
He’s also quick to hand Leinart credit that got buried under both their NFL endings. Before that Rose Bowl turned Young into a legend, Leinart was the guy every young quarterback was chasing.
“He set the tone for a lot of us that was playing that quarterback position,” Young said. “You want to be in the same shoes as Matt Leinart, throwing the ball, throwing stats, Heisman Trophy. He motivated a lot of us as quarterbacks to want to do the same.”
The NFL didn’t go the way either of them drew it up. Leinart calls games for Fox on Saturdays now. Young is telling his side on Netflix. But the thing that survived from that whole era wasn’t the draft hype or the stat lines. It was this.
“He gives a damn,” Young said. “So when you got a guy like that gives a damn, you got to make sure that you continue to respect that type of person and wish him the best in everything he does.”
Rivals for one night and brothers ever since.
Good kismet, amirite?
Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young is out on Netflix now.