We were wrong.
That’s the only reasonable conclusion we can come to at this point, after Tua Tagovailoa and Mike McDaniel did it again; after they outshot another great quarterback, broke your fantasy football scoring system and proved their offense is harder to kill than a plastic houseplant.
We were wrong to doubt the quarterback, to paint him as injury prone, to diminish him as a product of the system, to take digs at his fitness. Did you see the game-winning touchdown he threw against the Chargers on Sunday? A goal-line fade to a wide receiver the size of your middle school basketball league’s power forward? That isn’t a throw for a puppet quarterback. That’s a one-putt through the windmill on hole 18 of the world’s most ridiculous mini-golf course. He did it with time winding down on the road with one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL sitting on the opposite bench.
THE TUA-TYREEK CONNECTION. AGAIN 😱
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) September 10, 2023
(via @NFL)pic.twitter.com/As4E3i7AxX
We were wrong about McDaniel, too. To consider him just a seedling off the Shanahan tree and not the dang arborist. To figure that his team wouldn’t be able to surprise anyone again. To speculate that the Dolphins might be in better hands with someone else. He’s one injury away from the 2022 NFL Coach of the Year award, one injury away from likely upsetting the Bills in the first round of the playoffs. This Dolphins team, when fully intact, is not just a contender but a force. How many teams are taking over the ball just before halftime at their own 25 and getting into field goal range within nine seconds?
This isn’t a Week 1 overreaction if it’s more than a year in the making. These Dolphins were just sidetracked last season on their way to revealing the truth: Even without Jalen Ramsey they can navigate football’s better conference handily if they remain healthy. They are a weekly powder keg. They are a schematic force that, sans running game, is still throwing for more yardage than Texas Tech.
Jayne Kamin/USA TODAY Sports
I keep saying “we” because Dolphins doubt is omnipresent unless you own a Cleo Lemon jersey. It’s easier to catch than a daycare virus. It’s on television and radio. It’s here on this website. McDaniel touched on it briefly in his postgame press conference in Los Angeles, where he mentioned that there were “a lot of statements made” in the offseason that his players ignore. And to the point of the masses, even with all of their offseason upgrades it was, admittedly, hard to see. Miami won games last year that embarrassed opponents. Tagovailoa, who was so allegedly broken in 2021 that he had a hard time seeing the field, threw six touchdowns in Week 2 last season, then had three straight games in Weeks 8 to 10 in which he threw three touchdowns and no interceptions, in which he averaged a completion percentage close to 80 and a passer rating over 135.
In a league where every coach spends their down time obsessing over the idea of not getting waxed like that again; not having the camera pan downfield to a wide open Hill, or Jaylen Waddle streaking away from a defender, it felt impossible for McDaniel to maintain an edge. It felt impossible for Tagovailoa to keep up.
Now, the quarterback started Week 1 against one of the most expensive defenses in the league and hung 466 yards on them. Tagovailoa is getting rid of the ball faster, throwing deeper, taking more calculated chances and elevating more of his talent than most quarterbacks in the NFL right now. He finished Sunday (before the Giants-Cowboys game) with the fourth-highest passer rating of the weekend.
So often, we see Week 1 as a kind of death. What we loved about last year wilts because it is someone’s job to make it wilt; to make it less effective, to expose it. On Sunday, the Dolphins had more “explosive” plays in a game than all but one other team since 2014. Tagovailoa threw for more yards in a season-opening game than all but four quarterbacks in NFL history. Hill logged more receiving yards (215) than all but three.
So often, we refuse to admit we’re wrong when the truth is right in front of us. Not this time. Not me.
