For Leinart, Real Work Began After the Game

He had just won the Orange Bowl. So where was Matt Leinart headed next?

To “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Leinart, the Heisman Trophy-winning star of the BCS championship game, was in big demand.

Jay Leno wanted him. Dennis Miller wanted him. David Letterman surely would have been thrilled to have him. Probably Oprah, too.

But he chose Kimmel.

Then it was time to take a break and get some rest.

“I’m going on maybe two hours sleep total,” Leinart said in his dressing room Wednesday night after taping Kimmel’s show.

Landing the quarterback was a coup for Kimmel.

“I never worked so hard to line up a guest,” said John Carlin, the show’s sports talent coordinator.

It helped that ABC, which carries “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” televised the Orange Bowl.

Carlin gave a lot of credit to Tim Tessalone, USC’s sports information director, and Teri Wagner, ABC Sports’ vice president of programming, for making it happen.

“We were talking on the phone at 2:30 a.m. Miami time, still working out details,” Wagner said.

It also helped that Kimmel had Leinart and teammate Shaun Cody on after last year’s Rose Bowl victory over Michigan.

But the key was getting Leinart’s friend, Nick Lachey, to agree to appear as well.

“I probably wouldn’t have done the show without Nick,” Leinart said.

Lachey was in Miami for the game to see his friend play and his sister-in-law, Ashlee Simpson, sing at halftime. He had to leave his wife, Jessica Simpson, behind at their beach house there on Wednesday because they were entertaining a group of friends. Lachey flew back to L.A. with Leinart on the USC charter.

Lachey, 31, stars with his wife in an MTV reality show, “Newlyweds.” He and Leinart met in October.

One offshoot of their friendship is that Leinart is reportedly dating Jessica Simpson’s personal assistant, CaCee Cobb.

“All I can say is we are friends, and she is a sweet person,” Leinart said after the taping. “I’ll leave it at that.”

Leinart earlier had told Kimmel on the air that he didn’t have a girlfriend. He also said, “It’s hard for me to get girls.”

Who was he trying to kid?

During the taping, Kimmel hit Leinart pretty hard about leaving USC for the NFL.

“You are gone,” Kimmel said. “I don’t know if you know this, but they’re paying players millions of dollars now.”

In the hallway after the taping, Kimmel said to Leinart, “You have to go.”

But a few minutes later, Leinart pondered the question in his dressing room and said, “I’m leaning toward staying.”

His deadline for declaring is Jan. 15.

“The most important factor is, what is best for myself and my family?” Leinart said. “I look at this as a win-win situation, no matter what I choose to do.”

Leinart came to the taping with three teammates, tailback LenDale White, receiver Greig Carlson and quarterback Brandon Hance. The USC charter landed about 4 p.m. Wednesday. After the team went to the USC campus, the four players were off in a limousine to the Kimmel show taping in Hollywood.

After the taping, Leinart rejoined his friends, signed a few autographs and headed back to his apartment at USC.

It was time to get some sleep and contemplate what he had accomplished 24 hours earlier, as well as over the last two football seasons.

“It’s bizarre, really,” he said. “It’s like a perfect script.”

HD’s Prominence

ESPN2 began televising college basketball in high definition Thursday, another example of how prominent HD has become. Joe Cohen saw it coming years ago.

Cohen, chairman of HTN Communications, a leading sports transmission company, was the head of the Madison Square Garden network when it began televising New York Knick, Ranger, Yankee and Met games in high definition in 1998.

“The key to all this is we now have 10 million high-definition television sets in this country,” Cohen said, “and it is projected that we will have 45 million by the end of 2008.”

Short Waves

ESPN Classic announced that it would air the Liberty Bowl, the Capital One Bowl and the Rose Bowl again at 3, 5 and 7 tonight.... The National Thoroughbred Racing Assn. announced that NBC has won an Eclipse award for its Belmont coverage last year, and ESPN won one for a documentary on Smarty Jones. The Eclipse awards will be presented at a dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Jan. 24.

Recommended viewing: Even if reality television isn’t your thing, “American Dream Derby” is worth a look because it provides an excellent behind-the-scenes look at horse racing. The eight-episode series, which pits 12 contestants against one another in a handicapping competition, makes its debut Monday at 9 p.m. on GSN, formerly the Game Show Network. The first seven shows have already been taped, but the final show Feb. 21 will be live. All of them take place at Santa Anita. At stake is $250,000 and a stable of thoroughbreds for the winner.

In Closing

Even worse than Ashlee Simpson’s halftime performance at the Orange Bowl was the halftime highlights segment that mixed in football with a U2 music video. Sometimes you have to wonder, what are these ABC producers thinking?