(Note: After I wrote this article, it was revealed that Tua Tagovailoa reported concussion symptoms following a tackle in the first half of the Packers game. Tagovailoa is now in the NFL’s concussion protocol).
Right now, there is no quarterback in the NFL going through the same kind of backslide as is Tua Tagovailoa of the Miami Dolphins. It has seemed throughout the season that whenever Tagovailoa and Miami’s potentially explosive offense puts things together, circumstances will collide and conspire to tear them apart.
The latter phenomena certainly happened in the month of December for the Dolphins after a first three months of the season in which Tagovailoa was as hot as any quarterback in the league. From opening week through the end of November, Tagovailoa was a legitimate MVP candidate. He completed 198 of 284 passes for 2,564 yards, 19 touchdowns, three interceptions, and a passer rating of 115.7. But in his four December games, Tagovailoa completed 61 of 116 passes for 984 yards, six touchdowns, five interceptions, and a passer rating of 80.5.
Of course, the fourth quarter of Miami’s 26-20 Sunday loss to the Green Bay Packers, in which Tagovailoa threw interceptions on three straight drives and the Packers scored 13 unanswered points, was the nadir of the entire experience.
This was another first-act/second-act issue, in which Tagovailoa went from Shakespeare in the Park to “Puppet Show/Spinal Tap” all too quickly. In the first half against the Packers, he completed nine of 12 passes for 229 yards, a touchdown, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 144.4. Tagovailoa had more than one explosive play in that first half, but this absolute banger of a 52-yard throw to Tyreek Hill with 11:44 left in the second quarter would seem to indicate that Tagovailoa’s December blues were behind him.
And then, a second half in which Tagovailoa completed seven of 13 passes for 81 yards, no touchdowns, three interceptions, and a passer rating of 33.3 — which means that Tagovailoa would have been better off handing the ball to his running backs on every play.
Asked about those three picks after the game, Tagovailoa tried to provide as much clarity as possible.
“On the first one, I tried to throw it over a defender, but I ended up really throwing over the defender and Tyreek, so that one got away. The second one, I might have said the wrong play. I’m not too sure. But there was just some communication errors on that. Then the third one was just not a good ball for my receivers to have been able to make a play on that.
“You know, it’s tough. You get an opportunity to play on Christmas Day against a really good team, and I go out there and really — not being able to put my best foot forward for our team. In hindsight, this is something that we’ve got to be able to just move on from. Like I say with ‘Bev,’ (Darrell Bevell) he says, ‘let every play stand on its own merit.’ So for this game, we want this game to stand on its own merit, as well.
“Obviously, we’re going to learn from these mistakes, but this isn’t something that after a loss we should be going home and taking to our families, our kids, our other halves. We leave it all here and we go enjoy Christmas, and then we come back in when time is, and we learn from it.”
The first interception was caused by a lack of vision.
A lack of vision, and literally more than figuratively. The first interception, which came with 14:08 left in the fourth quarter, had the Dolphins at their own 20-yard line. Tyreek Hill’s pre-snap motion told Tagovailoa that the Packers were likely playing zone, and this was Cover-4 nickel with a four-man rush, and linebacker Krys Barnes as the spy/middle hook defender based on what Tagovailoa did.
Once Barnes deduced that Tagovailoa wasn’t running, he dropped into Tagovailoa’s field of vision, This seemed to be the reason Tagovailoa missed an open Jaylen Waddle on the quick timing slant. Instead, he was left with no option in his mind but to try and feather the ball over Barnes’ head, and get it there before cornerback Jaire Alexander could zip in and pick off the pass.
That didn’t work too well. Tagovailoa seemed to think that Barnes wasn’t making that drop, and that’s how a lot of interceptions happen.
Alexander certainly won the post-game interview portion of the program.
Holy crap Jaire Alexander rules. pic.twitter.com/Z2nUr67ctb
— Kevin Clark (@bykevinclark) December 25, 2022
The second interception may have been on the receiver.
The second interception came with 6:09 left in the fourth quarter. The Dolphins had second-and-13 from the Green Bay 30-yard line, and it certainly looked as if Tagovailoa expected running back Raheem Mostert to run some kind of quick comeback, as opposed to the vertical route he ran, Mostert did eventually turn around, but that was only to try and figure out where the ball went. It went to linebacker De’Vondre Campbell, who read and jumped Tagovailoa’s intended pass, as ill-fortuned as it may have been.
Tagovailoa pointed to a communication issue, and Mostert confirmed it.
“The route was supposed to be different. That was on my part. I didn’t mentally rep that, like I said, I got to go back and figure out what needs to be done. But that was definitely my fault. That’s not Tua’s fault at all.”
The third interception was preordained.
Coming into this game, and despite the fact that he’s been all about explosive plays, Tagovailoa had thrown 14 touchdowns and no interceptions with less than 2.5 seconds to throw, and 10 touchdowns to five interceptions with 2.5 seconds or more.
Add that to Tagovailoa’s history of success with RPOs, and you’re dealing with a quarterback who is used to first reads being open based on the structure of the play. Even on those more explosive plays, head coach and offensive shot-caller Mike McDaniel had done a great job of getting first reads open on downfield stuff, so it’s not as if Tagovailoa is going to become a dominant third-read guy overnight.
His third interception, which came with 1:34 left in the game from the Miami 31-yard line, was a pre-determined throw to tight end Mike Gesicki on a little bender route. The Packers were in Cover-2 with Campbell dropped 12 yards back from the line of scrimmage pre-snap, so this was all about taking the big play away.
It was also another field of vision issue, as linebacker Quay Walker dropped into hook/curl coverage from the middle of the field. Clearly, Tagovailoa wasn’t expecting that. He said that it just wasn’t a good ball; I think this was more about what he couldn’t see. Cornerback Rasul Douglas saw it just fine — he peeled off his press assignment on Tyreek Hill, and got in the way.
Douglas thought Walker was going to get this one. It’s never good when the defense is discussing all the potential opportunities for an interception before the play even happens. “Before the snap, I told Quay he was going to get it,” Douglas said after the game. “He dropped one early. Quay, you going to get it back, it’s going to come. When I turned around, it was coming right at me.”
Both Campbell and Douglas did a great job of breaking late to the ball and fooling Tagovailoa, which should be another point of concern McDaniel and the Dolphins at this point in time.
How can the Dolphins fix this?
Tagovailoa’s recent regression is disconcerting, but it’s not entirely unusual. It happened to the AFC East’s best quarterback in his third season, as well. In 2020, Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills came out of the gate strong, with 12 touchdowns and one interception in his first four games. Then-offensive coordinator and current New York Giants head coach Brian Daboll did a brilliant job of giving Allen the kinds of man-beaters he could use to demolish coverage. The trade for Stefon Diggs certainly helped.
Then, there was a mid-season stretch in which defenses changed the locks on Allen with more zone coverage and safety switches. Allen struggled until Daboll brought everything back to basics, exhorting Allen to take the easy completion and get in a rhythm. Once Allen got his head around those more multiple coverages, Allen was able to take the entire playbook, and beat the rest of the NFL over the head with it.
Tagovailoa does not have Allen’s all-time arm talent, but there is enough on the ball here for him to turn it around. Like Allen, he had a great offensive play designer. Like Allen, he had a top-tier receiver acquired in an offseason trade. Now, it’s up to McDaniel to give Tagovailoa a relatively soft landing in the Dolphins’ last two regular season games (against the New England Patriots and the New York Jets, who each have excellent defenses), or there will be no postseason.
“It’s a challenge, but it’s also something that every quarterback really goes through,” McDaniel said Sunday of Tagovailoa’s recent travails. “It’s kind of one of those necessary things that you have to really figure out how you don’t let mistakes snowball and that’s one of the reasons the approach and the way we’ve gone about things has been so intentional in that regard, because you can’t let past influence the present. I think that there could be some portions of that that have to do with him kind of snowballing in his own mind, but he’s such a strong individual that the good news is that I’m very confident that he’ll be able to get through that.
“It’s just that this team needs him. This team needs myself to make sure that all those situations are not putting him behind the 8-ball. And then the quarterback needs the rest of his team to be able to execute so that he doesn’t have to do too much on his own. There was one of the interceptions that the primary receiver [Mostert] kind of busted, ran the wrong route, a concept that we ran numerous times this week, and so it’s not just him.
“I’ll look at the tape and have probably more concrete answers for you guys tomorrow, but overall, that is a team failure, not a one-person failure.”
It is a team failure, but whatever the answers are, they’d better come with a quickness.
