Mike McDaniel credits Tua Tagovailoa's ability to "work within the noise"
Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa continues to be one of the most polarizing players in the NFL. Plenty believe he's great. Plenty believe he's not. And there's not much of a middle ground between those camps.
On Wednesday, coach Mike McDaniel was asked about the manner in which Tua handles the reality of high expectations and wins and losses that fail to satisfy them.
"I think it's one of the reasons I focus on how he grows as a quarterback in the micro instances that I think are so difficult as a franchise quarterback [in] the National Football League," McDaniel told reporters. "If you're uncomfortable with the stakes of the game, it's not a game for you. You're not going to change the stakes and he knows that, and I think that's why I put such a priority on focusing on what he's working on, being able to get better at things.
"While that is also always true, bottom line, black and white, you're held accountable for the results while you're trying to get better. That's difficult. I think he's as experienced as anyone with positive or negative noise, and I think in that, you find the best version of yourself when you're able to allow your own thoughts and decisions to dictate your opinion of yourself and how you're carried towards others and how you handle all those things. So not easy, but I think that's something that no quarterback in the National Football League is not exposed to. I think that's something that is very, very challenging and what separates people is that ability to work within the noise. If they tell you you're awesome or that you suck, how does that relate to what you're doing to influence your next performance? That's what he does."
Still, the bottom line is that Tua's contract suggests a level of performance that he can't consistently achieve. And it makes more than fair the question of whether the Dolphins rushed to give him a long-term contract with a new-money average of $53.1 million and three years of fully-guaranteed compensation one full year before he was eligible for free agency.
Who were the Dolphins bidding against? How much would Tua have gotten on the open market?
They could have paid him $23.171 million for 2024 in his fifth-year option. They could have franchise-tagged him at $40.241 million for 2025. They could have tagged him again in 2026 at a 20-percent bump over the 2025 tag - $48.2892 million.
That would have been a three-year haul of $111.7 million, and the Dolphins would have had year-to-year flexibility to end the relationship with no additional cost. Instead, they gave him upwards of $150 million fully guaranteed for three years when they signed him.
Again, why? The contract only increased Tua's expectations. Which makes the lack of a playoff appearance in 2024 and the current trend of no postseason for 2025 even more glaring.
The contract already seems to have been a massive failure by the Dolphins. It points to an eventual housecleaning in South Florida, unless the Dolphins quickly and decisively turn things around.
And if they move on from the G.M. or the coach (or both), the Dolphins will still owe Tua his full salary for the first year of the next regime, one that surely will want to find a new quarterback for the Miami Dolphins.