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.