Six years of bad decisions and bad luck at quarterback: How Dolphins mess was avoidable

It’s difficult enough to win in the NFL if you make bad personnel decisions but still get lucky.

It’s even more difficult to win when you make good decisions but are unlucky.

But when you make bad decisions and you’re unlucky at the game’s most important position, you’re ostensibly doomed.

It has consistently been one or the other for six consecutive years for the Dolphins at quarterback, where one bad choice after another has left the franchise compromised, and even a decision that wasn’t an egregiously poor one (drafting Tua Tagovailoa) has been foiled, yet again, by his latest concussion.

It didn’t need to be like this, of course.

Thirty years ago, then-Colts executive Bill Tobin famously said ESPN draft analyst Mel Kiper Jr. “has no more credentials to do what he’s doing than my neighbor, and my neighbor’s a postman.”

But a few of the Dolphins’ missteps at quarterback have been so clearly avoidable that your neighbor’s postman might have gotten them right. And we’re not even including the Dolphins’ 2006 doctor-recommended decision to trade for Daunte Culpepper instead of signing Hall of Famer Drew Brees, the team’s biggest mistake this century:

To recap the last six years of QB miscalculations:

▪ After the 2018 season, owner Stephen Ross dismissed coach Adam Gase, explaining that Gase “wants to win.” It couldn’t have been any clearer that Ross wanted to tank the season and position the franchise to select the best quarterback in the draft, later identified by the Dolphins as Joe Burrow.

But instead of signing a quarterback bad enough to engineer a two-win season, they opted for one good enough to prevent the Dolphins from accomplishing the paramount goal of a tank season and snagging the golden-arm QB of their choice. Predictably, Ryan Fitzpatrick was good enough to lead Miami to five wins.

Josh Johnson, A.J. McCarron and Blaine Gabbert were all free agents that year. None might have torpedoed the Dolphins getting Burrow. All would have been cheaper than Fitzpatrick.

But the Dolphins picked the one journeyman who would screw up the tank. And yet…

▪ They still had another chance to get the tank on track after they inexplicably traded a second-rounder and fifth-rounder for Josh Rosen in April 2019, only to find out he couldn’t play a lick.

If general manager Chris Grier or Ross had simply ordered then-coach Brian Flores to continue playing Rosen after he struggled badly in three starts, Fitzpatrick wouldn’t have had the chance to win games against the Jets, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and New England — wins that eliminated the Dolphins’ dreams of Burrow.

▪ The Dolphins cannot be castigated for the pick of Tagovailoa, ahead of Justin Herbert, at No. 5 in the 2020 draft, because of Tagovailoa’s sterling play for much of 2022 and 2023.

Nobody could have anticipated the string of concussions, even though he had one at Alabama. But the Dolphins, as has often been the case with this regime, brushed aside Tagovailoa’s durability issues in college, including two high ankle sprains, a posterior wall fracture and hip dislocation.

Even if Tagovailoa was never concussed, how many general managers — last April — still would pick Tagovailoa ahead of the next two quarterbacks drafted in 2020: the more physically gifted Herbert (who went sixth) and Jordan Love (26th)? It likely wouldn’t have been a long list; Love, after all, received slightly more more than Tagovailoa in his contract extension.

And with Tagovailoa’s outlook precarious after his fifth concussion, is there a single GM who would select Tagovailoa now ahead of Herbert, Love or Jalen Hurts (selected 53rd that year)? That’s unfathomable.

So the Dolphins finding themselves in this predicament with Tagovailoa was more bad luck than bad scouting. But it could have been avoided with a more competent handling of the tank.

▪ Deciding to give Arizona a second round pick for Rosen — who had one touchdown, five interceptions and a dismal 52.0 passer rating in six games as a Dolphin — prevented Miami from drafting Pro Bowl receiver DK Metcalf, who went two spots after that second-round pick that Arizona foolishly used on Andy Isabella.

In a world in which Miami had signed a more tank-worthy quarterback and hadn’t traded a second-rounder for Rosen, Burrow could have been throwing to Metcalf in Miami, and Dallas Pro Bowl linebacker Micah Parsons could have been the draft pick, a year later, over Jaylen Waddle.

▪ The decision to sign Mike White in the first hour of 2023 free agency was a puzzling one, as we wrote at the time.

White had the lowest passer rating of any of the top dozen or so available backup quarterbacks in that 2023 free agent class. The Dolphins knew that his deep ball metrics were historically dreadful, that he wasn’t mobile, and that he had 12 career interceptions, compared with eight touchdowns.

They knew that of the three quarterbacks they brought to training camp in 2023, two of them (White and Skylar Thompson) had two of the league’s four worst passer ratings in 2022.

And yet they signed White anyway, bypassing similarly priced but better 2023 options Andy Dalton, Sam Darnold and Gardner Minshew. White got $5.5 million guaranteed; Dalton, who was brilliant for Carolina against Las Vegas last weekend, got $8 million guaranteed in a two-year, $10 million deal.

With Dalton, the Dolphins would stand a much better chance of surviving this Tagovailoa absence.

In 2023, Darnold and Minshew cost the 49ers and Colts, respectively, less than what Miami paid White.

Miami had another chance to land Darnold or Minshew but bypassed them (and Joe Flacco and Jameis Winston) again in free agency in March, deluding themselves into believing that White and Thompson were enough if their injury-prone starting quarterback was again injured.

If you haven’t noticed, Darnold has led the Vikings to a 3-0 start, and Minshew guided Las Vegas to a Week 2 win in Baltimore.

And a Dolphins team that inexplicably relinquished a second-rounder (and a fifth-rounder) for Rosen wasn’t even willing to offer a conditional fifth for Justin Fields, who had a far better body of work than Rosen.

Pittsburgh acquired Fields for a conditional 2025 sixth-round pick and he has led the Steelers to a 3-0 start.

The poor evaluations at backup quarterback fall equally on coach Mike McDaniel and Grier. And that leads us to…

▪ The final 16 picks of the 2022 draft. Two quarterbacks, both from the Big 12, would be chosen with those final 16 picks.

The Dolphins scouted the Big 12 fastidiously that year, as they always do, but picked the wrong guy, opting for Kansas State’s Thompson at pick 247 over Brock Purdy, who went 262nd and last.

You all know the rest of the story: Purdy led the NFL in passer rating in 2023, has a superb 111.1 rating in his career and is 18-6 as a starter.

Thompson appears no better than a borderline NFL player, with a 66 passer rating in nine appearances.

Yes, every team passed on Purdy. But only the Dolphins selected another quarterback in the seventh round that year.

▪ The Tagovailoa extension. This was not a question of whether Tagovailoa deserved a lucrative new contract; his play the past two years likely warranted one, even though he has struggled against nemesis Buffalo.

But as I said repeatedly on the Dolphins In Depth podcast, an extension was too risky because of Tagovailoa’s history of head injuries.

The Dolphins could have gone year-to-year with Tagovailoa through 2026. The only downside would have been potentially paying a bit more later, with somewhat larger cap hits.

But the risk of the extension, in our view, was too great because of financial consequences. If the Dolphins eventually want to move on from Tagovailoa because of concussions, the dead money cap hit on his four-year, $212 million extension would be at least $84 million, severely handicapping the team’s ability to replace him or augment other positions.

Perhaps signing Tyler Huntley — and not pursuing Ryan Tannehill — will work out better than the half dozen or so aforementioned decisions, every one of which the Dolphins assuredly would reverse if they could go back in time. (Even if the Dolphins still wanted to extend Tagovailoa, the cost would be considerably cheaper now after the latest concussion.)

The Dolphins can blame misfortune, if they wish, for their predicament at quarterback. But if they want to blame someone or something, they should start by blaming themselves, for regrettable decisions involving most everything else at the position.