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Laser focused: It’s about football now for Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa after offseason of measures taken to stay healthy

david furones, south florida sun-sentinel
·9 min read
Laser focused: It’s about football now for Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa after offseason of measures taken to stay healthy

MIAMI GARDENS — There was a point in the middle of Miami Dolphins training camp ahead of the 2023 season when coach Mike McDaniel added a Sunday practice to the schedule. The idea: Veterans shouldn’t get too many consecutive days off following a preseason opener where starters were rested.

This practice, added within a week’s notice, could’ve easily been an opportunity for established players on the roster to mail it in and breeze through the motions. Besides, they can pick things up the next day to ramp it up leading into the coming week of joint practices with the Houston Texans.

Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa wasn’t taking it like that.

He was itching to get back to work to correct inefficiencies that had the offense sputtering in the previous week’s joint sessions with the Atlanta Falcons, especially since he didn’t get another crack at them in the exhibition, with backups Mike White and Skylar Thompson splitting game snaps.

Tagovailoa demanded all the reps in team drills that day. Mistakes were still made in that intrasquad session, sure, but it was the way he attacked a day that could’ve been viewed as an extra burden. He saw it as necessary work.

That’s the eagerness with which Tagovailoa is approaching a pivotal 2023 season, his fourth in the NFL. That’s the focus he has on his play on the field, all the while the focus of many on the outside regarding Tagovailoa may be more about his health and availability.

Tagovailoa understands why that’s a talking point following multiple concussions in 2022. But after an offseason of measures taken to give himself the best chance to avoid injury, it doesn’t dominate his thoughts anymore as the regular season nears.

Tagovailoa is ready to focus on football and leading the Dolphins, who have opened a win-now window while hopeful Tagovailoa is entering his prime.

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And there’s more to Tagovailoa heading into the 2023 season than a quarterback that’s trying to get over injury concerns.

He’s a passer that is expanding on a breakthrough third season. He’s a family man that’s maturing after having one child, with another on the way. He’s a student of coaching that, in 2023, finally involves him being in the same offense for a second consecutive season. He’s a growing leader capable of imparting confidence in teammates the way McDaniel and star receiver Tyreek Hill did for him last year.

He’s a quarterback that’s ready to win and wants to bring a Super Bowl to South Florida for the first time in 50 years.

So what is the strictly football perspective for Tagovailoa?

He’s coming off a year where he showed, working in McDaniel’s offense and surrounded by playmakers like Hill and Jaylen Waddle, he can play. In 13 games: 25 touchdowns, eight interceptions, 3,548 yards, 8.9 yards per attempt and a 105.5 passer rating. The last two of those statistics led the NFL.

“I feel like I’ve answered a lot of questions,” Tagovailoa told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in a preseason interview. “I feel like there’s also a lot to prove for myself.”

That might include finding greater consistency, especially against top defenses and playoff teams to avoid last season’s late-year tailspin.

“I think that’s the joy of being a competitor, is that you’re never satisfied,” he said. “Nothing’s ever good enough. Nothing’s ever too good. Nothing’s ever too bad. But you’re always finding ways to get better.”

In order to answer the questions he did last season, it took a jolt of confidence-building. Much was made of a 700-play tape McDaniel created for Tagovailoa to prove to him he was a capable NFL quarterback. The effort was doubled down on by Hill, propping him up in every national interview he did and even comparing Tagovailoa to his former teammate Patrick Mahomes, whom most would consider the league’s top quarterback.

“I think it was definitely special to have the support of someone like Tyreek. It was very special to have the support of someone like Mike, being the head coach,” said Tagovailoa of something he didn’t feel under former coach Brian Flores. “It’s not something that I felt like I had my first two years, so it was very special with Mike having shown me the 700 plays, how Mike portrays the offense.”

And all the while that was happening, there was another type of maturity brewing. One that’s more relatable to us regular folk, the non-NFL quarterbacks. That of becoming a parent.

Ahead of last season, Tagovailoa welcomed his first child, Ace. The son has altered his father’s perspective in ways he could never comprehend.

“After games, regardless of if I threw seven touchdowns or if I had the best passer rating that week, or if I had the worst passer rating, the kid didn’t care,” Tagovailoa said. “He just wanted to see me, and for me, that gets me excited, going and wanting to see him. He just doesn’t care.

“In a way, it changes that mindset, like, okay, yeah, bad things are going to happen. You got to expect that, but the longer you linger on them, the worse your play will get, the worse things will start to compile against each other. He helped with a lot of things, although he couldn’t say a thing.”

Tagovailoa, always known for accuracy and pocket presence while developing his deep passing over time, has a wild card working for him in 2023 of being in the same offense for a second season. This is something he has never had in college or the pros.

After four different offensive coordinators and play-callers in his first three years with the Dolphins, the new season presents him with the continuity from McDaniel on down to offensive coordinator Frank Smith and quarterbacks coach Darrell Bevell.

“You know what their expectations are coming into the new year because you had them for a whole year already,” Tagovailoa said. “You understand who they are as people. You’ve almost sort of built a relationship with them, so I would say it’s been really cool.”

With many — not all — questions answered about his play, critics have shifted their narrative from questioning his game to whether he can make it through a season healthy.

The offseason provided seven months of answering every question from his strength training to jiu-jitsu workouts and a new helmet that should help protect his head more.

Now, he wants to shift the conversation back to the play of he and his team. It’s evident in how his tone, facial expression and body language are altered when a press conference segues from talk about, say, his progression of reads to some reminder that he had multiple concussions last season. His enthusiasm from just discussing working with his teammates crawls into a shell at that moment.

Understandably so. How many other quarterbacks face just as many — if not more — questions about their health than the actual game?

The health aspect for Tagovailoa in judging his 2023 can be unfair from the standpoint that it’s something largely out of his control. He can have three-touchdown, no-interception games each time he trots out onto the field, but if he misses a handful of games again, the injury-prone label will remain on him. Something that may only be exacerbated if Dolphins backup quarterbacks can’t keep the offense churning, like what happened last season when Tagovailoa was out.

But all that said, he has done everything he can to attack the problem over the offseason. He has reached new weightlifting bests, noting he now benches 110-pound dumbbells after previously never reaching for them. The jiu-jitsu falls may not be muscle memory yet, but they can help when the moment comes. The new quarterback-specific VICIS Zero2 Matrix helmet can create a percentage improvement in his head safety.

When ESPN analyst Ryan Clark joked this preseason over the appearance of Tagovailoa’s offseason efforts only making him look thicker, McDaniel adamantly defended his quarterback’s strength gains.

“You want to talk about every metric that (head strength and conditioning coach) Dave Puloka and our strength staff really track, which is pretty much everything,” McDaniel said. “Every metric of strength that is measured, he has shattered his previous highs. In some instances, he’s almost twice as strong with things. That’s been a daily commitment that he hasn’t wavered from. He’s taken his nutrition to another level. He has taken his commitment to what he’s trying to do and really thought outside the box and really worked at it. I couldn’t be happier with the work that he’s put in, and what I’ve actually viewed from my own eyes.”

The jiu-jitsu training, by the way, he can continue to work into his schedule once a week during the season. While maybe not muscle memory yet, it showed he knew what to do during the preseason when he was hit as he threw against the Texans and immediately tucked his chin to his chest.

After his impressive season stat line in 2022, Tagovailoa doesn’t identify an improvement this season as any increase in numbers or games played. He views success through a team scope.

“Winning,” he answers simply.

And it’s not in the form of a first playoff win for the franchise since the 2000 season or reaching a particular round in the playoffs.

“Literally, we just got to win them all,” Tagovailoa said. “If you think of it that way, we should end up the (Super Bowl) winner.”

Part of that team that he wants to win for is South Florida as a whole. Tagovailoa feels himself more entrenched in the community the longer he has been here.

“I definitely feel a lot more invested in the city,” said Tagovailoa, inspired by watching South Florida’s other teams find recent postseason success. “You can just see it. You can just feel it. The city is just very hungry. Whatever we can do, the more we can do, the better.”

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