Even with Ryan Tannehill headed to AFC championship game, it was right to let him go
Ryan Tannehill will be playing in the AFC Championship game next Sunday against the Kansas City Chiefs for a chance to go to the Super Bowl in, you guessed it, Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium -- the same place he toiled for seven inglorious seasons with the Miami Dolphins.
This is true because Tannehill and his Tennessee Titans teammates knocked the top-seeded Baltimore Ravens from the postseason Saturday evening, 28-12, in a stunning upset of one of the past season’s most dominant NFL teams.
And afterward, typical of what we saw in Miami the past seven seasons, Tannehill kept the focus on the next assignment rather than embrace the grand possibilities of what a few more steps might deliver.
“My mentality is one week at a time,” Tannehill said. “Just get the win that week and then we’ll move on to the next game after that. Yeah, big picture you dream of playing in the Super Bowl but as the season goes on it’s one week at a time, do whatever I can each and every week to come away with the win.”
That viewpoint is fine for Tannehill but for Dolphins fans everywhere, the instinct now is to lash out viscerally.
You want to hate on this turn of events. You want to punish whoever allowed these events to happen.
The urge is to blame the Dolphins. Or the media. Or past coaches. Or current coaches.
Someone, you believe, must pay that Ryan Tannehill is no longer a Miami Dolphin.
Because it seems like a gargantuan screw-up that the Dolphins’ former quarterback is on the road to the Super Bowl immediately after the team traded him to the Titans for a 2020 fourth-round draft pick and even agreed to pay him a $5 million bonus and carried $18.4 million in cap charges for him in 2019.
What a mess!
Heads must roll!
Yeah, none of that.
Look, sometimes taking the correct course of action doesn’t necessarily work out exactly as scripted. But that still doesn’t make the move wrong.
It was not wrong for the Dolphins to ultimately move on from Ryan Tannehill. It wasn’t wrong when they did it in March of 2019 after Brian Flores and his staff decided Tannehill wasn’t for them. And it isn’t wrong now that Tannehill is riding a wave of solid play through these playoffs.
Because ultimately what Tannehill is giving the Titans is quite similar to what he gave the Dolphins in the 2016 playoff run. Tannehill then was a part of a bigger whole much like he is now.
Those Dolphins won enough to get to the playoffs by giving the football to a burly running back, by wearing down opponents, and by letting Tannehill manage games.
In Tennessee during these playoffs, Tannehill has done the exact same thing. He’s avoided big mistakes and benefited from a fine offensive line, the physical running of Derrick Henry, and his own occasional contributions.
It’s been an amazingly successful recipe for the Titans. And we should celebrate Tannehill is doing this. We should embrace that the guy is enjoying hard-earned success.
Dilly, Dilly, Ryan!
But make no mistake, that Titans’ recipe has not included elite quarterback play from Tannehill.
Tannehill completed 7 of 14 passes for 88 yards with 2 touchdowns against the Ravens Saturday night. He didn’t throw an interception. He rushed for a 1-yard touchdown. His quarterback rating was 109.5.
This was ... good.
And it was better than last week’s win at New England in the wildcard round but not by leaps and bounds. In that game, Tannehill completed 8 of 15 passes for 72 yards with 1 touchdown and 1 interception.
Both those games were enough to advance the Titans to the next round, which is the point of the whole postseason. Both were enough to win within the framework of the Tennessee offense. And that’s what Tannehill can deliver.
But let no one mistake that work with stellar or elite -- which is what Tannehill will face next week in the person of Patrick Mahomes and what the Dolphins are hoping to find in the next quarterback they draft.
So both these things being true, it’s good for Tannehill that he’s in Tennessee. And it’s acceptable for the Dolphins that Tannehill is in Tennessee.
This is not a Drew Brees situation. The Dolphins didn’t just let a franchise quarterback leave their building.
They let go of a solid quarterback who was expected to cost $26 million in 2019. They moved on from a QB who had never taken the team to a playoff game in seven years, who had been injured in each of the past three years, including 2017 when he missed the whole season recovering from ACL surgery.
That all happened. That’s the history. Resist the urge to try and rewrite it.
And resist the urge to be upset Ryan Tannehill has found success in Tennessee.
This story was originally published January 12, 2020 at 2:05 AM.
