Bud Wilkinson was so upset that he wasn’t thinking clearly. The Cardinals head coach was talking about trading Jim Hart, the Big Red’s four-time Pro Bowl quarterback, to the New York Giants for Randy Dean, a third-year, backup QB.

This was September 30, 1979, in Los Angeles. The Cardinals had lost, 21-0, to the Rams, their fourth defeat in five games to start the season. The year before, Wilkinson’s first as head coach, the Cardinals had lost their first eight games before winning six of their final eight. But the optimism engendered by that finish was long gone.

Now, as Wilkinson and several other team members ate dinner together before their red-eye flight back to St. Louis (Ozark Airlines, the team’s regular carrier, wasn’t operating because of a flight attendants’ strike), the bewildered coach vented and talked about making changes. First, he threatened to cut a couple of players the next day (that didn’t happen).

“Then he voices frustration with Jim Hart, specifically a lack of mobility,” recalled a senior member of the Cardinals administration who was at the dinner. “He said you can’t win without a quarterback who can move, as in run. He said he would like to trade Hart in order to get a mobile QB.

“Bud regarded Hart as being good at many things: a good passer, reading defenses, etc. He was just focused on a QB who could run. But Randy Dean? It struck me as a college football mentality. NFL quarterbacks in those days were not running wild. It was a pocket-passing game.”

A fifth-round draft pick in 1977 from Northwestern University, Dean and his twin brother, Robert, had played on the U.S. handball team in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. But as an NFL player, he had started only two of 21 games for the Giants. His statistics: 61 pass attempts, 29 completions, 278 yards, one touchdown and five interceptions. One of his starts came late in the ’78 season in a 21-0 win over the Cardinals. In that game, Dean completed eight of 14 passes for a paltry 24 yards with one touchdown and one interception.

Dean also rushed seven times for 29 yards, including a long run of 11 yards, in that game. Could that have been what caught Wilkinson’s attention?

Whatever, it became a moot point when Wilkinson quickly scrapped the idea of trading Hart.

But wait. There’s more to this story.

In late November, with the Cardinals at 3-10 and headed for another losing season, Big Red owner Bill Bidwill instructed Wilkinson to bench Hart for the final three games and start Steve Pisarkiewicz, a first-round draft pick in 1977. At that point, Zark had played in only three games (one start) and hadn’t impressed the coaching staff.

Wilkinson and Bidwill already had had some disagreements. When the coach refused to make the change at quarterback, Bidwill fired him. Big Red legend Larry Wilson, then the team’s director of pro personnel, was named interim coach for the final three games of the season.

So, the coach who, some nine weeks earlier, had considered trading Hart was canned because he wouldn’t bench him. How about that for irony.

As Big Red fans know, Hart went on to play four more seasons in St. Louis and still holds many of the franchise’s career passing records.

As for Randy Dean, he never started another NFL game. The Giants traded him to the Packers after the 1979 season, and the Packers cut him before the 1980 season. That was the end of his NFL career.