Shortly before the draft got underway on Thursday night, news broke that the Eagles and Cardinals were swapping draft picks to settle a tampering investigation.
The investigation was triggered by a phone call that Cardinals General Manager Monti Ossenfort made to Jonathan Gannon after the Eagles won the NFC Championship Game. Gannon was the Eagles defensive coordinator at the time and any Cardinals contact with him was impermissible because he had not interviewed with the team yet.
Gannon wound up interviewing after the Eagles lost to the Chiefs and was quickly hired as the new head coach in Arizona.
“I made a mistake,” Ossenfort said, via the team’s website. “I own that. It’s a situation we were able to resolve. I have apologized to [Cardinals owner] Michael Bidwill, I’ve apologized to our staff. The deal we worked out, it is what it is and we are moving on from it.”
The Cardinals gave the Eagles the 66th pick in this year’s draft and got the 94th pick back along with a 2024 fifth-round pick.
Ossenfort made a more beneficial swap for the Cardinals once the draft got going as he landed Houston’s 2024 first-round pick to move from No. 3 to No. 12. The Cardinals later moved back up to No. 6 in order to select tackle Paris Johnson.
