Josh Dobbs was traded from the Cardinals to the Vikings just before the NFL trade deadline — and after, he says, he had been assured by Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon that he wouldn’t be traded.
Dobbs said on the Torchbearers podcast that Gannon had told him he would remain the Cardinals’ starting quarterback until Kyler Murray returned to the field, but then changed his story and said rookie Clayton Tune would start. But Dobbs said that even after Gannon told him he had lost the starting job to Tune, Gannon assured him he wouldn’t be traded.
“I go to the facility on Monday and JG, the head coach in Arizona, called me into his office and said, ‘We’re going to start Clayton Tune,’” Dobbs said. “I was upset with it but I understood the situation the franchise was in.”
Even after being benched for Tune, Dobbs says, he took Gannon at his word that the Cardinals were keeping him for the remainder of the season.
“Woke up Tuesday morning with a text from my agent saying, ‘You could be traded today because it’s the trade deadline,’” Dobbs said. “And listen to this -- when I had my meeting with JG in Arizona, he looked at me in the face and he said, ‘You’re not getting traded, you’re not being released, you’re going to be here in Arizona’. I was like, OK, cool. So then I woke up to that text saying all right the trade deadline’s in four hours, you could be traded, you could go to Minnesota or go back to Cleveland.”
Dobbs got traded to Minnesota and came to realize that over his last day and a half as a Cardinal, nothing he had been told was true.
“The last 36 hours, whatever was told to you, something different has happened,” Dobbs said.
Dobbs’ comments are believable considering what Gannon said publicly: Gannon first said Dobbs would start against the Browns, only to change his mind the next day and say Murray would start when medically cleared and Tune would start until then.
Although Dobbs was blindsided by the Cardinals trading him, things worked out for him: He led the Vikings to a win in his first game in Minnesota and now has a chance to lead them to the playoffs — somewhere the Cardinals will not be heading this season.