Cardinals Encounter Phone Mix-Up with Draft Pick Jeremiyah Love

The Cardinals had their sights set on Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love, ready to make him the third overall pick in the draft. However, a surprising hiccup arose as the team struggled to reach Love due to a phone number mix-up.

Cardinals General Manager Monti Ossenfort explained the situation candidly, stating, “If you want me to tell you the honest-to-God truth, we had the wrong phone number. 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.”

Despite the confusion, Ossenfort assured that there were minimal trade conversations surrounding the pick. “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,” he noted.

This year, the NFL implemented stricter controls around access to prospects’ phone numbers following incidents of prank calls made to several players last year. Teams were provided a single point of contact in football operations to safeguard this sensitive information. While the specifics of how the mistake was rectified remain unclear, the Cardinals ultimately managed to connect with Love just in time to make their selection.

Note: This recap is an independently written summary based on publicly available reporting.