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The inquiry into what went wrong for the Dolphins this season will be long and painful. They can point to the freezing weather in Kansas City and the mountain of end-of-season injuries as reasons for why they fell at the first hurdle in the playoffs, but such thinking would ignore the issues that plagued the team during the rest of the season. They couldn’t beat good teams. They burned draft picks on players who couldn’t contribute down the stretch. A defense that promised to be one of the best in the league was erratic.
Yet those issues sit on the fringes of the biggest of them all: Should the team commit to Tua Tagovailoa as their long-term quarterback? We now have too much evidence that Tagovailoa is a fine point guard. Slot him into a point-and-shoot role with the ideal supporting cast and a great play-caller, and he can thrive. But when things go wrong – when he’s missing key pieces, when he’s forced to improvise, when his offensive line is conceding too much pressure – he folds.
Related: The NFL has never seen anything quite like the Eagles’ warp-speed collapse | Bryan Armen Graham
The options beyond Tagovailoa are limited. The team could look at a trade for Justin Fields. They could make a run at Kirk Cousins in free agency. But Cousins is coming off an achilles injury, and for all Fields’s promise, Tagovailoa is a more seamless fit in Mike McDaniel’s offense.
Miami has plenty of talent and a good coaching staff. But they’ve found themselves in one of the worst places in the NFL: quarterback purgatory. Tagovailoa is too good to move on from but too limited to overcome imperfect circumstances.
Dallas Cowboys: The end for Mike McCarthy?
It was just so quintessentially Cowboys. A 12-win season and a disastrous playoff loss. Long camera shots of a confused, irate Jerry Jones turning to his son in his suite. Stephen, do you have Belichick’s number?
This was not difficult to predict. For as long as McCarthy has coached,…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/tua-mccarthy-offseason-questions-eliminated-100006465.html
Author : The Guardian
Publish date : 2024-01-18 10:00:06
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