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—tickled 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.
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