Tua Tagovailoa career path offers three possibilities. Only one will work for Dolphins | Opinion
There’s only three ways the Tua Tagovailoa era can go.
We know that. There aren’t any other choices
The Dolphins and their fans are hopeful Tagovailoa’s time as the franchise’s starting quarterback — which begins Sunday against the Los Angeles Rams — will be great.
And that’s one way things can go.
Great!
“I think he’ll play great,” offensive coordinator Chan Gailey said this week of his new starting quarterback. “That’s what you anticipate. You anticipate him going out there and seeing the defense, and knowing where to throw the football and making good throws and making good decisions in the run game, as far as getting us where we’re supposed to get blocking-wise.
“I expect him to play excellent. But that’s the way I feel about every week going into every game. You think you’re going to play great.”
The problem is Gailey thinks Tagovailoa will be great. He doesn’t know.
This we do know with certainty: The inventory of possibilities of what we’re about to see from Tagovailoa is finite. There’s only three possibilities.
1. Tagovailoa is great, just like Gailey is hoping and expecting. He’s every bit the player the Dolphins thought when they drafted him No. 5 overall in the 2020 NFL Draft. He is every bit the dynamic passer he was at the University of Alabama.
2. Tagovailoa is solid, but not elite. He has good games, he has bad games. He improves over time but not as much as everyone hopes or the team needs. He doesn’t hurt the team, but neither does he consistently put the team on his shoulders and raise the Dolphins to championship heights.
3. He’s terrible. In this scenario, the scouts who thought him smallish and not really able to make plays off-schedule when everything breaks down are right. If Tagovailoa cannot perform when he’s healthy or if the pre-draft concerns about his durability manifest into him missing many games, then it’s bad. And the Dolphins, who tanked for Tua in 2019, made a mistake.
Those are your three choices. That’s it.
Great.
So-so.
Terrible.
Three choices, and only one of those is really what the Dolphins and their fans are looking for.
Three choices and perhaps surprisingly the worst of those is No. 2 — the so-so option.
Let’s explore each possibility:
Great: If Tagovailoa picks up the mantle that Dan Marino carried in the 1980s and ‘90s, he will be a cool drink of water for a franchise that has endured a desert experience the past 20 years.
If Tagovailoa can lift the team and be that guy, the Dolphins will be a perennial playoff team and consistent championship contender. Brian Flores will be winning coach of the year awards (because I will vote for him). And Chris Grier, with the team the past 21 seasons, might retire sometime around 2040 as the club’s greatest general manager.
So, yeah, great is what everyone is shooting for.
Terrible: No one I’ve spoken with either inside the Dolphins or around the NFL expects this. Even the Tagovailoa naysayers believe he will be at least functional as an NFL player. No one is expecting Tagovailoa to be a bust.
But if he comes anywhere close to that, people are going to get fired.
The folks who decided the best thing to do in 2019 was to strip the team in order to land Tagovailoa in the 2020 draft will be fired. The scouts who endorsed Tagovailoa as a franchise quarterback will be fired.
Grier? Flores?
Fired.
Anyone who was in that draft room and agreed Tagovailoa would be a franchise saving pick goes. Because with a bad quarterback, the Dolphins would have a pretty bad team.
No bueno.
So-so: Let’s be clear because this initially sounds like an acceptable outcome, but it’s not. I would argue this is the worst possible outcome.
Because even if Tagovailoa is terrible, the team moves on in a couple of years. And the folks who made the mistake fade into club history. And we’re starting over in 2022 or ‘23.
So a couple of rough years.
But if Tagovailoa turns out to be merely so-so, some of us might be dead or raptured before the Dolphins are championship-caliber again.
If Tagovailoa plays solid-but-not-great as a rookie, the natural and fair reaction will be to show patience. Because not everyone’s Marino.
Then he plays solid but not great next season. More patience. And the following year he has some good games, but also some bad games, and it’s not awful even if the Dolphins still aren’t championship caliber and still don’t have an elite quarterback.
Before you know it, we will be seven or eight years down the road and the Dolphins will be in the same situation they were in during the Ryan Tannehill era.
And during that time, the club will eventually have to pay Tagovailoa to keep him — in hopes he takes that leap everyone understands he hasn’t taken but is optimistic he might soon take.
And one season bleeds into another.
And hope becomes despair because the Dolphins never escape mediocrity.
Club owner Stephen Ross said before the 2019 season he had no intention of letting his team continue to ride that treadmill to profound mediocrity. He didn’t want a team that was sometimes 10-6 but then dropped to 6-10 and always hovered in the general vicinity of not-good-enough.
What he really meant is he didn’t want a quarterback who was merely solid enough to get the team to the middle of the pack and never consistently to any championship level. The Dolphins have done that for 20 years, and it wasn’t fulfilling.
Reaching that highest plateau is the goal now, and Tagovailoa was selected to be Miami’s guide to the mountaintop. He was not selected to be an annual trip the the valley of mediocrity.
“We’ll see,” Flores told Southern California reporters Wednesday. “He’s shown himself pretty well in practice so far. He’s a young player, so he’s got a lot to learn, but he’s a sponge, and he’s willing to learn and wants to get better.
“Those are really — normally when you have those, that type of character, you can improve over the course of your career. Hopefully we’ll start that on Sunday.”
This story was originally published October 28, 2020 at 8:48 PM.
