Since his football career ended in August 2013, Matt Leinart has been a part of the FOX Sports family as an analyst. Now, he is a part of FOX’s Saturday college football pregame show, BIG NOON KICKOFF , which began in 2019. Over the last eight years or so, the 2004 Heisman Trophy winner has had to work his way from the ground up and grow into a profession that he wasn’t sure he would be good at:
Leinart was a recent guest on The Sports Business Radio Podcast promoting the work he is doing with his new company, Hall of GOATS. He was asked about becoming a broadcaster and it was something he wanted to try once his playing career was over, but he didn’t know how good he would be:
“I hired my agent at the time because I knew it was something that I wanted to try. I didn’t know what I would do. I didn’t know if I would be any good at it, but I wanted to try to get in broadcasting, whatever that meant.”
“FOX is right down the street here in L.A. There were a couple USC people there. We made the connection. Super grateful and I started, did a couple random shows to see if I liked it. Didn’t really have a deal, a couple of one-off things. I think I showed potential. My role kind of grew there because FS1 launched the year before. We were still trying to figure out what shows to put on-air and getting teams in place.“
One of Leinart’s good friends is Joel Klatt. Klatt was a part of FOX’s college football studio shows before becoming a color commentator with Gus Johnson. Once Klatt left the studio, Leinart got the chance to take that spot with Dave Wannstedt, Robert Smith, and Rob Stone at the time and he has enjoyed the atmosphere at FOX:
“It’s been 8 years. I’ve grown and moved up the ladder and worked really hard. It’s such a great atmosphere there. It’s so much fun.”
As Leinart was looking for advice about how to be a good studio analyst, Klatt gave him a piece of information that has stuck with him over all these years:
“I sat with him and I said about the studio show, how do you prepare? He said the studio show is this: prepare a mile wide and an inch deep… If you are calling a game, you are only talking about that game, so you are preparing everything for that game with a couple bullet points here and there on college football. On a studio show, you are covering 100 games and 100 players and different storylines, but you are doing it in a much shorter time. That was the best advice. I’ve always used that advice. Prepare for everything.”
Preparation is key for Leinart and as a part of BIG NOON KICKOFF, he knows he not only has to prepare for FOX’s game of the week that the crew is on-site for, but also to talk about any topic in college football and he enjoys that challenge:
“You are going to get exploited and exposed really quick if you don’t prepare and you don’t know what you are talking about. Some of it is just football so you can talk ‘ball because you have the experience and you’ve been in the locker room and played in big games, you can relate that way. There’s a lot of stuff going on in college football. A lot of moving parts. It’s not like the NFL where all you have is free agency, but for the most part, these teams stay intact for years,” said Leinart.
“There’s always people graduating or leaving for the NFL and there’s always new recruits coming in, so you are constantly changing. That to me is the fun part because it’s challenging in that regard to where you are constantly learning and constantly studying.”
