Perhaps you’ve heard of Joshua Dobbs, the itinerant NFL genius who hijacked the first half of this strangest of NFL seasons, in which more typical story lines have been bludgeoned by a play with “tush” in the name, an international pop star and now America’s most famous engineer. That’s Dobbs, by the way, part rocket scientist, part journeyman quarterback, part folk hero.
But rather than continue wearing thin his remarkable but oft-told, Mad Libs–style backstory, maybe a different tact works better. Which is how Matthew Mench came to conduct the strangest interview of his long and decorated career in higher education. See, while Mench is now dean of Tennessee’s Tickle College of Engineering, he’s also Dobbs’s former professor, mentor and friend. Hence why Mench is—dad joke No. 1 incoming— by the improbable turn Dobbs’s career has taken this season. The attention placed a football-field-sized spotlight on the engineering programs at UT, the intensity so large and so centered, it threatened to blind not just everyone on campus but all of Knoxville or all of Tennessee; as in, the state.
Mench pops onto a Zoom screen at 8:20 p.m. ET sharp Sunday, just in time for . Minnesota faces Denver in a matchup of middling teams that both believe they’re destined for more. Dobbs again will start at quarterback for the Vikings, the team that traded for him with the Cardinals, the deal completed only 20 days earlier, on Halloween. He’ll start in place of Kirk Cousins, whose season-ending injury set a glorious sequence of events in motion.
Dobbs’s career transactions log doubles as the NFL’s answer to . It mightbe longer than the league’s voluminous rule book: drafted (Steelers; April 29, 2017), signed (May 22, 2017), traded (to the Jaguars; Sept. 9, 2019), waived (Sept. 5, 2020), claimed (Steelers; Sept. 6, 2020), signed (also the Steelers; April 19, 2021), signed (Browns; April 8, 2022), waived (Nov. 28, 2022), signed (Lions; practice squad, Dec. 5, 2022), signed (Titans; active roster, Dec. 21, 2022), signed (Browns again; March 20, 2023), traded (Cardinals; Aug. 24, 2023) and traded yet again (Vikings; Oct. 31, 2023).
In those traveling-man seasons, Dobbs was part of what seemed like every way to be transacted: drafted, demoted, added to practice squads, removed, released, signed, cut and swapped. Sometimes he’s played a lot (this season, 10 starts), sometimes not much (eight other career games, plus he didn’t get onto the field at all in 2017, ’19 or ’21). He started, backed up and backed up backups along the way. He missed games due to injury, even seasons (’19). And, when he play, he sailed deep attempts downfield, managed games, learned new offenses, bonded with new teammates, mastered the art of checkdowns, scampered in for scores, coughed up turnovers, won and lost. He made active game-day rosters. He was inactive. This season alone, he posted four games with multiple touchdowns. This season alone, Part II: traded, yeah, . “Just bounced around forever,” Mench says.
The dean’s Zoom background isn’t, um, (Dad joke No. 2) to impress. He appears to be set up in a guest room of sorts. But it’s hard to tell, because, behind him, the wall is blank and painted white. He laments UT’s loss to Georgia over the weekend and notes his love for college football, which started while enrolled at Penn State.
Mench is less of an NFL fan than a Joshua Dobbs . He joked with the quarterback recently about how many jerseys he owns with DOBBS stitched across the back. At least six, Mench estimates. After the Cardinals dealt Dobbs to the Vikings, the move owing to Kyler Murray’s impending return, Mench sent his guy a text message. “Man, I gotta go get jersey,” he wrote. “I have them [from] about half the NFL at this point.” But Mench also knows how much this means to the engineer who keeps delaying his career in engineering. , Mench added.
Dobbs responded in typical fashion, with a joke about how he had looked up the trade-in policy for NFL jerseys and Mench was still within the three-month window to take the Cardinals version back. The funny part is he wasn’t joking. Dobbs, big-brained QB that he is, had actually done the research.
