Tagovailoa immediately shows trait Dolphins love, but there are dissenting opinions on QB
Grading teams on their work hours after the draft is one of the least productive jobs in sports journalism. It’s almost as bad as offering grades of position groups immediately after a game, without the ability to watch the tape of what actually happened along the line of scrimmage and in the secondary.
It’s offering an opinion, but often an uninformed one.
So I have never in all my years of journalism done a draft grade for the Miami Dolphins.
And in the early years when I was forced to do grades after games, I did so under protest, promising not to eat halftime hot dogs so I could eat more at company expense afterward.
I am not going to grade the Dolphins for their 2020 NFL draft.
But I am going to offer some insights that have caught my attention 24 hours after the fact and with the benefit of talking to experts around the league.
It centers on the selection of quarterback Tua Tagovailoa with the No. 5 overall pick: The Dolphins, led by coach Brian Flores and general manager Chris Grier, got their guy.
This team has been in #TankforTua mode for more than a year, and that paid off Thursday night.
“Brian, myself, the coaching staff and scouts — watching him for a couple years and finally ... meeting him at the Combine and getting to know him and find out what type of person he really is, which we all heard great things,” Grier said.
“You really get to sit down and talk to people and you don’t really, truly know [what’s going to happen]. I think for us, it was going through our process.”
Good. So the question now is whether this pick, which comes at a high cost, will pay big dividends in the future.
That’s not as easy to answer as one might believe.
Let me just say if Tagovailoa becomes Drew Brees — pundits compared him to Brees before the draft and Dolphins fans warned the team not to repeat the same mistake with Tua they made with Brees — then this draft is a home run. Period.
If Tagovailoa is a Hall of Fame player, I will be thrilled to plead his case before selectors as the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s South Florida representative 20 years from now.
And in that presentation, I’m sure I won’t be talking about whether Austin Jackson turned out to be a good left tackle or if Raekwon Davis managed to stay on the field all three downs (he won’t).
None of that will matter.
Tua great. Whole draft great.
Want proof?
In 2000, the New England Patriots drafted a tackle named Adrian Klemm with their first selection, which came in the second round. And Klemm was out of New England in four years and gone from the NFL in five. And then the Pats drafted a running back named J.R. Redmond, who gained a grand total of 676 yards his entire career.
And on and on the failed picks rolled in.
But the New England Patriots had an awesome draft in 2000 because they picked Tom Brady in the sixth round. Nobody remembers all the busts Bobby Grier, Chris Grier’s father, picked that fateful draft in 2000 because he also picked arguably the greatest quarterback of all time in the sixth round.
Amid the garbage, Grier unearthed one rose. And the sweet perfume of that pick forever wafts over that draft.
Similarly, if son Chris hits a home run on Tua but his other 10 picks are busts ... we’re going to remember the home run at quarterback.
But if Tua’s not great in Miami, the Dolphins are going to have a problem. Chris is going to have a problem. Bobby is going to have a problem because Chris has a problem. And, oh yes, Flores is going to have a problem.
If Tua’s not great, folks are going to get fired for picking him. Nobody’s going to remember the rest of the draft no matter how good it plays out if the quarterback doesn’t play out well.
Simple as that.
So is there a problem with this?
Not if you ask Tua. He’s cool. He’s ready to get cracking.
“With the given circumstances, I’m just going to be talking to the coaches and kind of seeing how we’re going to go about doing things as an organization,” Tagovailoa said. “From there really, we’ve just got to hope and pray that everything works out and that we can get back to spending time as a team.
“I think for me, the most important thing is probably getting everyone’s phone number on the team and just creating relationships. Maybe starting out with the quarterbacks and then working my way down to the linemen or starting with the linemen, but just creating relationships a little at a time. Especially during times like this, it’s hard, so I think that’d be best.”
Are you kidding me? That’s a rookie talking.
Five minutes after getting drafted he’s thinking about calling the entire locker room, starting with the quarterback room and offensive line.
This is a small sampling of why the Dolphins really like Tagovailoa. He is an off-the-charts leader.
“He fit a lot of the criteria we talk about at the quarterback position,” Flores said. “Good player, good person, leadership qualities. We’re very happy with the pick.”
So all this is obviously great. You good with that happy tale?
Good, end of column for you.
Bye.
But there is more. Because aside from the possibility the Dolphins are right and Tua is a Hall of Famer and everything goes great, there is the other possibility.
And I’m going to outline that for you.
Because there are smart people around the NFL who were and remain as uncomfortable with Tua as the Dolphins seem comfortable. These are not former NFL people or unemployed NFL people.
These folks have Super Bowl rings. And they’re working to get more.
The New York Giants, for example, didn’t need a quarterback this draft. They got their guy, Daniel Jones, in 2019. But they did their work on quarterbacks this draft anyway.
And according to a league source, the Giants had Justin Herbert rated ahead of Tua Tagovailoa in their evaluations.
The Los Angeles Chargers also had Herbert ahead of Tagovailoa on their board. That’s the reason in my mock draft, I had the Chargers trading up to get Herbert and then the Dolphins picking Tagovailoa.
And this space made much of the point that Tagovailoa is a durability concern before this draft. The Dolphins obviously didn’t give a rip about that durability concern.
Durability, schmurability, they said.
But now I’m hearing other Tua whispers about, you know, football concerns. These come from NFL people with no dog in the fight because they weren’t going to draft Tagovailoa or any other quarterback.
These are those concerns:
Multiple teams were concerned about Tua processing quickly enough. I was told he is incredible when his first read is open because he is very accurate and gets the ball out quickly enough on target.
That worked well at Alabama because they came at other college teams with NFL-caliber wide receivers — two of which went in the first round of this draft. Those receivers usually won very quickly at the line of scrimmage.
So it looked great most of the time.
But I’m told when the receivers didn’t get immediately open, there were issues.
Now Tagovailoa had to process what he was seeing. And that process wasn’t quick enough often enough. And he relied more on instincts and not as much on intelligence and training to make his decisions.
And sometimes he guessed wrong, which is survivable in college but not in the NFL.
I’m also told when the pocket broke down and Tagovailoa had to get outside to save the play, his accuracy dropped significantly — as opposed to, say, Joe Burrow, who remained very accurate outside the pocket.
None of this is about durability. It’s football people talking about football.
The Dolphins are football people who apparently are comfortable with all these things. They expect to eventually see Hall of Fame Tua regardless what those other football people around the league think.
We will see soon enough.
This story was originally published April 27, 2020 at 1:33 AM.
