DeVante Parker’s best days come with Ryan Fitzpatrick at quarterback. The QB explains why
DeVante Parker wasn’t made available to reporters after yet another monster game Sunday, so we don’t know for certain his thoughts on current events.
But you could forgive Parker if he smiled, at least a little in a quiet moment, when he heard that Ryan Fitzpatrick would start at quarterback instead of Tua Tagovailoa on Sunday against the Jets.
Put simply, Parker looks spectacular when Fitzpatrick throws him the ball, and pretty average when Tagovailoa is under center.
Parker went for a season-high 119 yards and eight catches on 14 targets in the 20-3 win Sunday, proving once again to New York coach Adam Gase that he should have been featured more when Gase was Miami’s coach.
Parker, who has 642 yards and four touchdowns on the year, needs to average 72 receiving yards over the season’s final five games to eclipse 1,000 for the second straight season.
If Fitzpatrick — who knows how to throw Parker open and is excellent at offering up jump balls — were to start the rest of the season, that would be a near lock.
But Tagovailoa will get his job back whenever he returns from the thumb injury that kept him out of Sunday’s game, and when he does, he needs to learn how to best utilize the Dolphins’ best offensive weapon.
“DeVante’s very special with the 50-50 ball and some of those tough catches,” Fitzpatrick said. “For us, and really for me as a quarterback, if teams are going to give us the opportunity to do that, then I’m going to give DeVante the opportunity to make that play more often than not. People can say sometimes that’s not the right move and whatever else, but if I’ve got a guy that I trust, that I’ve seen do it over and over and over again, then I’m going to give him every opportunity to make a play. And he did a great job of making some of those today. It was just a lot of man coverage out there and a pretty classic DeVante Parker game when you play him in man coverage.”
This story was originally published November 29, 2020 at 6:40 PM.
