Why did Joshua Dobbs decide to leave the vikings team today?” There are a number of reasons behind his decision.View additional…

In professional football, cadence refers to all of the verbal signals delivered by the quarterback before the start of the play. They include numbers, colors and other coded words quarterbacks call out to tell the offensive players to get ready for a specific play, which includes the snap count. While the quarterback uses the huddle to communicate the play, often he will have to change it at the line of scrimmage, which is called an audible.

Complicated stuff, which is why quarterbacks are generally pretty smart.

The Minnesota Vikings use five cadences to run hundreds of offensive plays, which takes days, weeks and even months for quarterbacks to learn cold. But on Sunday, the Vikings didn’t have days, weeks or months to get their backup quarterback Josh Dobbs up to speed on the cadences. In fact, they had exactly zero time to do it because Dobbs was never supposed to be in the game. The starter for Sunday’s game against the Atlanta Falcons was Jaren Hall.

Hall, a backup who was forced into duty when the starting quarterback tore his Achilles, had been the guy “getting the snaps” last week in preparation for the game. Early in the game, however, Hall suffered a concussion and had to leave the game.

That meant that Dobbs, who had received no snaps — i.e., did not touch the ball at all all week — came into the game. Dobbs is what is known in the sports world as a “journeyman” quarterback, one who makes his living more or less being passed from team to team to serve, often, as a backup to someone else. In this sense, Dobbs is a journeyman’s journeyman, having served on five teams in the past calendar year. Acquired last Tuesday from the Arizona Cardinals, Dobbs hadn’t thrown a practice pass to any of the Vikings’ receivers, nor taken a snap from center Garrett Bradbury. He admitted he didn’t even know most of the linemen’s full names.