Matt Cassel Matt Cassel

Welcome to our newest member, Matthew GB Cassel

Matt Cassel is unsatisfied. He gets this from his mother, a well-known set decorator in Hollywood who raised four teenagers mostly by herself. Cassel is a dreamer, too, which he gets from his father, a screenwriter who never stopped trying until he died two years ago. Cassel is also enormously competitive, which he gets from his two brothers, who both made it into professional baseball. Cassel is the melding of many, a goofball who sings Backstreet Boys at karaoke, a mischievous kid who sometimes had to sleep in the coach's room on baseball road trips, and a romantic who decided not to transfer out of a tough situation in college in large part because of the woman who is now his wife. It was the middle of the night when Matt Cassel woke up to the earthquake. The ground rippled under his family's house in suburban Los Angeles, less than a mile from the epicenter of one of the fiercest quakes ever in an urban area. The backyard pool cracked, and a virtual tidal wave smashed into the room where Cassel and his older brother Jack slept. Chaos surrounded them for the next 30 seconds or so, the house crumbling, the boys calmly moving under a table to wait for safety. They were terrified, of course, but even back then, at 11 years old, Cassel made cool decisions in the middle of mayhem. Everyone but Cassel. "Hold your head up," he told his teammates. Matt Cassel used to drag his high school teammates out of the locker room. He wasn't a bully, or even a pain. He just wanted to work. "Come on, guys," he'd say. "Let's go back out there, run through the plays just one more time." Cassel wasn't just the quarterback at Chatsworth High. He also punted, did a little long-snapping and played safety, though he really wanted to play linebacker. Sometimes the family spent a half hour or so outside a restaurant while Cassel and his brothers raced to the car and back. "Once that came," Jack says, "for all of us, it was like, 'Wow, Matt did it.'" Matt Cassel is bragging. He doesn't do this often, but he's a proud man, and sometimes he just can't help himself. He'd like to tell you about the tile his wife gave him. "It has our daughter's footprint on it," he says. "It says, 'Quinn's first Christmas.'" Quinn is 8 months old now. He remembers the summer, when she was just home from the hospital, being woken up by the crying in the middle of the night. Matt and Lauren fed their baby, held their baby, sang to their baby, but they couldn't get their baby to calm down. If you have kids, you understand that Cassel tells this story with love. "I never thought I'd love anybody as much as I love my wife," he says. "Then (Quinn) came along. ... Now I can't think of life without her." When Cassel first came here, he knew less about Kansas City than it did about him. Now he can leave the GPS at home, he has a beautiful spread in a gated community, and he's dead set on finishing what nobody thought possible. He's no dummy. He senses the change, from fans giving the polite Midwestern smile and "hang in there" to high-fives and screams of thanks. Sometimes he hugs them back. "That part feels great," he says. "People doubt you in the beginning, then come around and understand ... the excitement's back. I didn't get that last year because there wasn't much to cheer about." ••• The conversation around Cassel is changing, too. He hears apologies now from people who doubted him, the best known coming a week or so ago when Cris Collinsworth wore a Cassel jersey on Showtime's "Inside the NFL" and joked that he meant his criticism as motivation. Cassel gets it. He wishes people could have seen what he saw last year, felt what he felt, but he understands how quarterbacks are judged. Nobody in the league improved more than he did, 27 touchdowns and seven interceptions becoming a symbol of the Chiefs' rise from last year's 4-12 to this year's 10-6 and AFC West championship. He laughs when he thinks about it. He's gone from whipping boy to potential icon, from getting lost trying to find the Plaza to having personal favorites at The Capital Grille, Bluestem and the Bristol. All of this in less than two years. He'll carry pieces of all those experiences and all those people with him today, and someday soon he may let on about more of it. But not yet, he says. Not until he and his teammates win a little bit more. "Honestly, I always had the confidence in myself," he says. May 17, 1982: Matthew Brennan Cassel is born to Barbara and Greg Cassel in Northridge, Calif., the second of what will be four children. June 3, 1999: Matt goes 3-for-4 with two RBIs in leading Chatsworth High to the L.A. city baseball championship. It caps quite a year for Matt, who in the fall accounted for five touchdowns in winning the City Divisional Championship. Cassel helps the Patriots to a 17-10 victory that day and starts every remaining game of the season, throwing for 3,693 yards and 21 touchdowns. New England becomes the first 11-5 team to miss the playoffs since 1985. Feb. 28, 2009: Cassel and linebacker Mike Vrabel are traded to the Chiefs for a second-round draft pick. Cassel signs a six-year, $63 million contract but suffers through a miserable first season in which he wins just four games. Dec. 8, 2010: Cassel undergoes an appendectomy and misses the Chiefs' 31-0 loss in San Diego four days later. He had thrown 23 touchdowns with just four interceptions to that point, and his absence amplifies his importance to the team. He returns a week later and puts up Pro Bowl-type numbers. Today: Cassel starts for the AFC West champion Chiefs in their playoff game against the Ravens. Win a Superbowl and I'll want to learn more about the life and times of Matt Cassel. Win a Superbowl and I'll want to learn more about the life and times of Matt Cassel. I had the same reaction. I felt like, If he flops tomorrow, all this will mean shit. No one expected Cassel to have a season this good. I don't think [Matt Cassel] will ever be as good as Grbac... No one expected Cassel to have a season this good. To say 'if we lose tomorrow , none of it meant anything' is bullshit, to me. My opinion of him doesn't change if he shits the bed tomorrow. "I think Cassel's lack of ability is going to cost us a handful of games.

The last game Matt Cassel started at quarterback was in 1999.It was against Long Beach Poly.That's a high school in California.Cassel was playing for Chatsworth High.And he lost. Note the wording of a sentence in the previous paragraph.The last game Matt Cassel started at quarterback ... See, he has started a game since high school.It was at Southern California, where he backed up 2002 Heisman Trophy winner Carson Palmer and then, instead of replacing him the following season, found himself beaten out by Leinart, who had been the third-string guy.So Cassel spent some time in 2003 at tight end, even starting a game there.He didn't catch any passes.Of course. Since then Cassel has been in the witness-protection program in New England, behind young stud Tom Brady and old farts Doug Flutie and Vinny Testaverde.And Cassel was sacked for a safety. Whatever you think of the Patriots, you have to be rooting for Matt Cassel. If Matt Cassel leads the NFL in passer rating in 2008, I'll stand naked at Boston Common.I kind of hope he does, come to think of it ... OK, gross.But we like gross.