Chris Grier talks Tua, Rosen and perhaps trading up in the first round at Senior Bowl
Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa has been linked to the Dolphins since basically the moment Stephen Ross fired Adam Gase and Mike Tannenbaum.
After 12 months of speculation and partial truths, team general manager Chris Grier could finally go on the record about the player many fans believe can and will lift the Dolphins out of their two-decade run of irrelevance.
The takeaway from his 15-minute Q&A with reporters here Wednesday: Grier might take Tua. But he feels no obligation to do so.
“We’ll evaluate him just like every player,” Grier said. “When people were talking about [us taking him], we said we weren’t tanking. We were trying to win and build. And so to say one player was attached to us, you can’t control what fans and people in the media say. So there’s no pressure for us. The pressure for us is to find the right guy to be the quarterback for the Dolphins, whether it’s him or someone else. That’s the pressure. Finding the right guy to lead the organization.”
For now, the guy who will lead the organization remains Ryan Fitzpatrick. Grier made a bit of news Wednesday when he said the Dolphins “fully expect” Fitzpatrick, their team MVP, to return in 2020.
But in basically the next breath, Grier acknowledged that “all of us” badly want to identify and acquire an elite quarterback to eventually replace Fitzpatrick.
“We’d like to find the right guy to be the quarterback,” he added. “You see how important it is around the league. So I wouldn’t just say it’s Steve. It’s Brian [Flores]. Myself. Coaching staff. Scouts. We think it’s important that we find the right guy, and the leader, to be the quarterback here for a long time.”
If Tagovailoa were healthy, he’d be a slam dunk pick. But he’s not. He is still recovering from a major hip injury that prematurely ended his college career. His representatives insist he will make a full recovery, but NFL teams won’t know that for sure until league doctors examine him at next month’s NFL Scouting Combine.
“I’d say we’re still so early in this process,” Grier said. “We haven’t met him, we haven’t sat down with him, talked with him. Our doctors haven’t seen him. We know as much as you do right now. We see the media reports and things of that nature. At the end of the day, we’ve got to get the know the guy, get in front of him, just like any player. We’re very, very early in the stage in the fact that we haven’t even met the guy yet.”
All that’s fair. But it’s also fair that Grier knows Tagovailoa, the player, as well as any prospect in the draft. He saw Tagovailoa play in person at least once this past season — he and Ross attended the Alabama-LSU game — and has been closely following his career since basically the moment he arrived in Tuscaloosa.
“He’s been a winner,” Grier said. “The fact that he won the Elite 11 and he goes to Alabama and has the storybook, coming off the bench in the national championship. Everyone always talks about his accuracy, et cetera. Talk about the person, as well. The intangibles that we talk about. Looking forward to getting to meet him.”
If Tagovailoa is indeed going to be fine, there will be a bunch of teams interested. Which means the Dolphins might have to move up from fifth to make sure they land him. Grier said the Dolphins, with three first-round have “more than enough” ammo to move up, if needed. But he also said there is “a lot of misinformation” being circulated by teams in an effort to improve their leverage.
One more bit of news from Grier’s media availability: He defended the Josh Rosen trade that cost the Dolphins their second-round pick in 2019 and a fifth-rounder in 2020. Rosen was among the league’s worst statistic quarterbacks and lasted just three games as the team’s starter before Flores went back to Fitzpatrick.
“We’re always trying to upgrade that position,” Grier said. “It’s a young player that has some talent for us to evaluate knowing we’re going to have picks and a lot of picks in the future and money available that it made sense for us to do that trade. After we made it, Josh has made huge strides Brian has talked about. It’s been fun watching him grow throughout the year. I know no one got to see it, but he did a tremendous job growing. And people always forget like I’ve said before, you’ve got four different offensive coordinators and schemes, and that’s hard for a young kid with no stability. So, we’re proud of him.”
This story was originally published January 22, 2020 at 5:27 PM.
