The Cardinals knew who they wanted to draft. They just didn’t know how to reach him.
Arizona was ready to select Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love at No. 3 as soon as it was on the clock. The Cardinals, however, had to wait to turn in the card since they couldn’t get Love on the phone.
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“If you want me to tell you the honest-to-God truth, we had the wrong phone number,” Cardinals General Manager Monti Ossenfort said, via Saad Yousuf of TheAthletic.com. “The phone number that we were given was the wrong one. That was the little bit of the delay. We got that straightened, out and we called Jeremiyah and we got ahold of him. That’s what the delay was — technical difficulties. There [were] very minimal [trade] conversations. There was some surface-level, but nothing that came anywhere close to getting us to move off the pick.”
The NFL limited access to prospects’ phone numbers after several players received prank calls last year. This year, the league gave the list of phone numbers to a single point of contact at the club in football operations, with that person charged with protecting the information.
It is unclear how the NFL corrected the error in time for the Cardinals to call Love before turning in the card.
