This is the end of the Tua Tagovailoa era in Miami, at least as we knew it. On Wednesday the Dolphins pulled off the BandAid, announcing that rookie Quinn Ewers would get the start for the remainder of the season, in a fleeting Hail Mary to see if Tua was truly the nexus of the team’s offensive issues.
The benching is not so much a punch to the gut, as a liver shot that takes the breath away, causing one to crumple in a heap. It hasn’t even been 18 months since the Dolphins signed Tagovailoa to a 4-year, $212M extension that made him one of the highest paid quarterbacks in the NFL, with a staggering $167M guaranteed — which will take years to course correct with the cap.
Tagovailoa is a cautionary tale for modern football. A lesson in how teams need to re-shape the importance of quarterbacks, fans should move away from the spurious notion that every team needs a franchise QB, and most importantly, learn the lesson that you don’t marry the first person who shows you a little love.
It’s a story that doesn’t begin when Tua was drafted in 2020, but 2022 when Tagovailoa had his first breakout year.
We can litigate McDaniel’s abilities as a coach and leader, but it’s very difficult to hate on his ability to draw up a stunning NFL offense. We saw him achieve this in San Francisco by transforming Brock Purdy into an All-Pro quarterback, and he did this with Tua in his first year in Miami.
The defense was an absolute mess, but the Dolphins went 9-8 on the season through the power of their offense. A variant of the West Coast system, McDaniel’s key wrinkle was removing any pretense of verticality. It spread receivers wide, and emphasized completing the pass, any pass, even if it was behind the line of scrimmage. This paired really nicely with Tagovailoa’s skillset, who possessed quick processing and confidence in his ability to make short throws.
If we dig into that 2022 season the devil was in the details. Tagovailoa threw for 3,548 yards — but over 1,200 of his yards came on YAC, and 1,431 yards came off play action. It was still incumbent upon him to execute, but what we see from these numbers is that plays had to be manufactured for Tua, rather than him creating them. This was not a quarterback who could take a snap under center, make a three or five step drop and drive the ball into tight windows.
This didn’t really matter to Miami. When you have Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle as your receivers, paired with a strong interior running game, it means the quarterback is a cog in the machine, rather than the machine itself.
We saw this same trend continue in 2023, but to even higher levels. In that All-Pro season we saw Tua’s stat sheet get stuffed with over 4,600 passing yards — which was enough to confuse him with truly being an irreplaceable franchise quarterback. Once again, advanced metrics told more of the story. This time over 2,100 of his yards came on YAC, with over 1,000 passing yards coming on RPO plays, and another 1,100 on play action.
McDaniel had added a devastating wrinkle to the offense by running 111 plays out of the RPO, but this meant that over a third of Tua’s passing attempts in 2023 came off RPO or play action. Again, he didn’t need to regularly drop back and make plays, instead having a chance to feast with a scheme that confused defenses, and asked him to just get the ball into the hands of a playmaker, not be the playmaker himself.
A franchise built on a house of cards
It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall during the spring of 2024. Something happened during this time that led the Dolphins’ front office to believe that Tagovailoa was utterly indispensable. This is where it all gets very tricky to work out. On the one hand you have Mike McDaniel, who had been benefitting from his offense working — but we know McDaniel is an analytics nerd who loved to dig inside the numbers.
Did McDaniel ignore the data staring him in the face? That Tua wasn’t really that special, the offense was — and that he was a benefactor. Was GM Chris Grier the driving force behind the extension? This was a man who had been in his role since 2016, and during that time saw the team struggle at the QB position with Ryan Tannehill, Jay Cutler, Brock Osweiler, and Ryan Fitzpatrick. Time, and time, and time again Grier attempted to find a passer, only to see the position struggle.
This could have been a collaborative screwup, with the Dolphins confusing finally landing a halfway decent quarterback with true brilliance, so Tua got his market-level extension which paid him like one of the top passers in the NFL.
The Dolphins regressed in 2024 in severe ways. This was the first year under McDaniel where the team didn’t add an offensive wrinkle to tweak the system, instead trying to run in back. Meanwhile in the NFL we saw the rise of simulated pressure taking over defenses. This was hugely problematic for the Dolphins offense. Without committing defenders to get downfield and chase the QB we saw linebackers fake pressure, then drop into coverage far more often — including taking away the flats, where they could diffuse the impact of Hill and Waddle on the YAC.
Yards after the catch plummeted by over 500 for the Dolphins in 2024, the RPO wasn’t nearly as effective, losing 400 yards, and with the interior rushing threat of Raheem Mostert waning we saw play action yardage drop by over 600 on the year.
It wasn’t that Tua failed, the offense did. That’s the key issue, and what set up the 2025 benching.
The story of the Dolphins offense this season has been about coming to the realization of what Tua is, and more importantly: What he isn’t. Losing Tyreek Hill to injury removed much of the offense’s ability to thrive on YAC alone, and it took the RPO out of the offense where Tagovailoa could use Hill as an alert. Instead we saw the offense change, which asked Tua to be more of a traditional quarterback, threading the needle downfield, going through a full progression, and making throws into tight windows.
These are skills he doesn’t really have. In the 2024 season roughly 40% of Tagovailoa’s passing attempts were behind the line of scrimmage, or less than five yards downfield — this year that number has dropped to to 28%. The Dolphins offense needed to evolve, and Tua couldn’t evolve with it. Issues with his limited arm strength have been compounded by fear, which has made him risk averse to throwing downfield with decisiveness, and this hesitation has thrown off timing routes and led to mistakes.
Monday Night Football was the realization that he can’t become that guy, but the truth is that he never was.
The ‘franchise quarterback’ myth
Everybody wants their team to have a franchise quarterback, but we’ve gotten too fast and loose with the definition. It’s become a weird binary where everyone is either branded as a “franchise QB,” or “trash” — without any nuance in the middle.
If we’re being truly honest with ourselves, all of us, there are roughly five franchise quarterbacks in the NFL right now. These are the passers capable of transcending a majority of complications which arise during the season, and skillsets which are so diverse that they are able to adjust to offensive tweaks mid-season while still being the driving force of a team’s offense — regardless of the weapons around them.
This used to be the barrier for calling someone a “franchise QB,” and in this current NFL we’re functionally looking at Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Dak Prescott, Matthew Stafford, and Lamar Jackson as examples of this ideal — with Drake Maye on his way. It doesn’t mean other quarterbacks are bad, they just aren’t the very top of the elite in the league, and that’s okay.
When we brand 15 or 20 quarterbacks as “franchise QBs” it removes the ability to differentiate the good from the great, the replaceable from the irreplaceable, and who needs to be paid 20% of a team’s salary cap, from those teams that would be better off getting better at numerous positions, instead of sinking all their resources into the quarterback.
None of this helps the Dolphins, who find themselves in a lurch. They fell into the trap of desperation at the QB position and feeling pressured into making a mammoth commitment to someone who didn’t warrant it. The long road to a rebuild starts now, and Miami is a cautionary tale for the next team who needs to make a big decision on a quarterback.
