There are many former NFL quarterbacks who are now broadcasters, but NFL Network’s Kurt Warner had one of the most unusual playing careers of any of them.
From stocking grocery shelves at a Iowa Hy-Vee, playing in the Arena Football League and NFL Europe, and then eventually getting to the NFL and posting a Hall of Fame career with the St. Louis Rams and Arizona Cardinals before turning to broadcasting, Warner’s story is incredible. And the first episode of this season of NFL Icons, premiering Friday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on linear and streaming channel MGM+, fleshes out some of what went into that.
Of course, the general beats of Warner’s story are familiar to many at this point. There was even a 2021 film (American Underdog, based on Warner’s own All Things Possible book) treatment of his career, with Zachary Levi playing him. But NFL Icons manages to dive deeper, and does so especially by using its key asset of incredible NFL Films archive material from games, practices, interviews, and Warner’s Pro Football Hall of Fame induction speech.
That material, combined with an extensive new sitdown interview with Warner, makes for an entertaining hour-long look at the quarterback’s unusual story. And the finished product here may be of interest to both those well aware of his career and those less familiar with it, and it’s a good start to this fourth season of NFL Icons.
A notable element there is seen right from the start. The episode uses Warner’s Hall of Fame speech as a framing device, which involves playing clips from it on a screen during his sitdown interview, showing his reaction to those, and then diving into more detail with him. And some of the interesting detail comes on his youngest days, from playing pickup football with his brother and stepbrother to shifting from wide receiver to quarterback in high school (and facing the “Kill Kurt” drill focusing on getting him to stay in the pocket and take hits as he threw, which he credited for a lot of his later success) to how disappointed he was not to get a college offer from Iowa, emphasized by the photos of him in Hawkeyes shirts.
Instead, Warner wound up at I-AA (now FCS) Northern Iowa. And there, he was the third-stringer for much of his four-year tenure, only getting to start his senior year. While he impressed there, throwing for 2,747 yards and 17 touchdowns, winning the Gateway Conference’s player of the year award, and even earning a tryout with the Green Bay Packers, things were about to get rockier for him.
It’s well-known that that 1994 Packers’ tryout didn’t work out for Warner, with him unable to earn a spot in that team’s talented quarterback room (featuring Brett Favre, Mark Brunell, and Ty Detmer). But this episode helps illuminate just how disappointing that was for him, even showing some of the footage from that camp. And it shows him even buying an SUV in Packers’ colors before training camp, and with his wife Brenda (there’s also a great story here on how they met) talking about sitting in the stands and hearing fans describe him as just a “camp arm” who would be cut.
That sets up some notable conversation from Warner about low moments, including his car running out of gas and him wondering where his life was going. That soul-searching continued when he took the job stocking shelves at night; he says “I got there the first night, and I remember thinking ‘Okay, no one has ever gone from Aisle 7 to the NFL before.’ And that was probably the toughest moment of my entire journey, because no one had ever walked the path before.”
NFL Icons even got him to re-don that Hy-Vee uniform and walk through the store:
There are some further interesting discussions in there on the grocery store, including on how often it wound up being referenced around Warner’s career. And there’s a significant bit in there about how the grocery store proved inspirational in one particular way. Warner says in his Hall of Fame speech that when stocking the shelves, he opened up a case of Wheaties with Dan Marino (another QB eventually turned broadcaster)’s face on the boxes, and that that proved motivational for him.
Warner says in his sit-down interview for this episode that “Everybody wanted to be on the Wheaties box. If you were on the Wheaties box, that means you made it. You were an icon of some form or fashion.” And, back in the PFHOF speech, he says “Every time I looked at the box, Dan seemed to be asking, ‘Are you going to spend your life stocking someone else’s cereal boxes, or are you going to step out and make sure someone else is stocking yours?’ And the episode does a great job at showing some images of Warner’s own eventual “Warner’s Crunchtime” cereal around that.
Of course, Warner’s career didn’t turn around to cereal-box status immediately after that. But it did start on an upswing.
He started playing in the Arena Football League with the Iowa Barnstormers in 1995 and really impressed there in 1996 and 1997, leading them to back-to-back ArenaBowl appearances and being named first-team All-Arena. (There are some good lines from him here on how much fun that brand of football was, and how it helped with the passing-focused offenses he’d later run in the NFL.) There are then some good details on how he went to NFL Europe and the Amsterdam Admirals because they were able to get him a futures contract with the then-St. Louis Rams, with that including some lines from then-Rams coach Dick Vermeil on how they were the only team willing to look at him.
Warner began as a third-stringer with the Rams, and was even left unprotected in the 1999 NFL expansion draft, but wasn’t chosen by the Cleveland Browns. He stuck with the Rams as their backup heading into that season, and then got his chance to start after Trent Green tore his ACL after taking a preseason hit from Rodney Harrison. (Interestingly enough, as Warner notes here, Green was the only teammate he thanked by name in his Hall of Fame speech. It’s also interesting that both Warner and Green have wound up as successful game analysts following their playing careers.)
But Warner’s performance with that team was electric. He threw for 4,353 yards with 41 touchdown passes and a completion rate of 65.1 percent that first season, earning the NFL MVP. And that paved the way for a 1999 Super Bowl run and championship (with him also earning the MVP award in that game), and for the offense dubbed “The Greatest Show On Turf,” which set a still-standing NFL record with three consecutive 500-point seasons:
That offense was pivotal and revolutionary, and it’s definitely influenced a lot of today’s passing-focused NFL. Warner has a good line at one point here of “We ushered in a new brand of football that everybody is playing now.” And he has an interesting bit where he looks back at an ESPN The Magazine “Special Ops” cover he’s saved on the Rams’ famed offensive players, which has them all wearing each others’ jerseys. Warner calls that offense “a collection of unbelievable talent, but maybe the most unselfish group of superstars I’ve ever been around.”
There would be more lows ahead, though. And for Warner, one of the most challenging came from losing the Super Bowl after the 2001 season (where he won his second NFL MVP award) to another unlikely backup turned starter (and now also turned broadcaster): Tom Brady.
Following that loss, things went downhill for Warner and the Rams. He struggled with injuries and poor play in 2002, and was benched for Marc Bulger in 2003 after fumbling six times in their first game (partly due to a broken hand that hadn’t fully healed). They released him in the summer of 2004, and he went to the New York Giants and started there, but was replaced by rookie Eli Manning after seven games. But that led to him signing with the Arizona Cardinals, and to a remarkable second act.
Some of the footage here on Warner’s Cardinals stint may be the most interesting. There are notable interviews with Ken Wisenhunt (the head coach for much of that run) and Todd Haley (the offensive coordinator for the 2007 and 2008 Cardinals) about how great Warner was not just as a quarterback, but as a leader and teammate, from giving other quarterbacks full support to sharing key lessons with others. And that’s backed up with mic’d-up sideline sound from the likes of Josh McCown, and with an interview with legendary receiver Larry Fitzgerald, who shares how one thing Warner told him about winning over individual stats stuck with him for his career.
But there are also remarkable bits here on the team’s success, and how so few in the NFL media and fan world ever expected them to do anything. And that includes their underdog run to Super Bowl XLV after the 2009 season. Interestingly, Warner says here the eventual loss there to the favored Pittsburgh Steelers wasn’t as crushing for him as the one to Brady and the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVI, as the way he and the Cardinals were up in the final minutes (before Ben Roethlisberger’s famed pass to Santonio Holmes) was something no one expected.
Warner also has good notes on his final home playoff game the following season, where he threw for five touchdowns and completed 29 of 33 passes for 379 yards in a 51-45 overtime win over the Packers (which remains the highest-scoring playoff game in NFL history). He talks about knowing how that would be his last home playoff game, and how it felt to go out that way. (His eventual final game, a blowout loss to the New Orleans Saints the next week where he got injured early, didn’t have as great of an ending, but it’s neat that he was able to put up his final legendary postseason performance against the team that first cut him.)
There’s also a little bit here on Warner’s transition to broadcasting. In addition to studio analyst work, that’s seen him team with NFL Icons narrator Rich Eisen to call games on NFL Network. That team ranked 15th out of 25 graded booths in our reader rankings this year, and earned some deserved praise for their improvement over the years. And the main takeaway from this episode on his announcing work is that Warner’s thrilled to still be around the game.
This NFL Icons episode’s a good illustration of what the series at its best can do. The overall beats of Warner’s story are familiar to many NFL fans, and that’s the case for most of the people they cover (the series isn’t titled NFL Under-The-Radar Stories). But the way this is told, with the combination of that archival footage and the new featured interview looking back at some of that, is a compelling watch that adds some detail even for those already well aware of his career, and an episode that could also be a remarkable telling of this story to those less familiar with it.
NFL Icons’ Kurt Warner episode premieres Friday, Jan. 17 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on MGM+. Further episodes, on DeMarcus Ware, Joe Montana, and Gale Sayers, will premiere the next three Fridays at the same time.
