Who will the Arizona Cardinals start at quarterback in Week 1 against the Washington Commanders? With franchise quarterback Kyler Murray out for a portion of the season as he recovers from knee surgery, veteran Colt McCoy was always supposed to be the answer.
However, the Cardinals shockingly released McCoy during training camp and traded for veteran journeyman Joshua Dobbs. Dobbs, 28, is on his sixth NFL team and has had two stints with two of those teams. Dobbs is competing with fifth-round Clayton Tune to start against Washington.
In an appearance on the “Burns and Gambo Show,” Cardinals head coach Jonathan Gannon acknowledged he’s picked a starting quarterback.
“We know what we’re doing, yeah,” Gannon said when asked about the starting position, per Donnie Druin of SI’s All Cardinals.
“Absolutely, there is. I learned that from Coach [Nick] Sirianni, truthfully. When we were a new staff, there’s always a little bit of cat and mouse in Week 1/Week 2; what are you gonna do? Do you show it in preseason? Are you really showing what you’re gonna play? Things like that.”
It’s a strategy that Washington Commanders head coach Ron Rivera understands completely.
“This is the 13th time I’ve gone through it, and when you open up with a new group, there are a lot of unknowns,” Rivera said of Arizona’s new coaching staff.
“And again, like you said, they’re exacerbating it by not necessarily telling you who their quarterback’s gonna be, and I wouldn’t either. But I think the big thing, more so than anything else, is you just kind of have to assume. I mean, part of it is you have to look at the background of where these coaches are from, who they, who they’ve coached for in the past, then you try to draw some correlations to that. And then you go back, and you look at what they did at some of their previous stops, and you pay attention to those things. Some of it will lead you in the right direction, and some of it, there’s nothing there.”
Rivera named Sam Howell as Washington’s starting quarterback last month.
The Commanders likely have a good idea of who will start under center for Arizona.
“I think we have a pretty good idea, a pretty good plan of what to expect or what to anticipate,” Rivera said. “The things that we’re not quite sure on, we’ll prepare for both.”