The Miami Dolphins are on their bye week, but made big news when head coach Brian Flores announced that Tua Tagovailoa, who made his NFL debut late in Sunday’s 24-0 win over the Jets, would be the starting quarterback going forward.
A bit shocking, given that the Fins are 3-3 with Ryan Fitzpatrick under center and Tua legitimately never saw the field until Sunday – especially so to Fitzpatrick, who said “my heart hurt all day” when he was told of the switch.
Well, there’s one Hall of Famer who feels his pain: Kurt Warner, who Tweeted support to FitzMagic on Tuesday once the word got out.
To Warner’s point, yes, the Giants were 5-4 in 2004 when Tom Coughlin made the decision to bench the veteran Super Bowl champ in favor of Eli Manning, who had a name pedigree (and the pedigree as the No. 1 overall pick) but only nine pass attempts to his name.
Didn’t work out well in the short-term, as the Giants lost Eli’s first six in a row – the back end of an eight-game losing streak that turned a 5-2 team into a 5-10 one – before finally winning in the season finale. It all worked out in the end, though, as Manning led the Giants to two Super Bowl titles in the next decade and a half, and Warner got a second life as the Cardinals’ starting signal-caller from 2005-09.
And so, while it may be tough sledding going from FitzMagic’s 95.0 QB rating and 70.1 completion percentage to a neophyte in Tua – especially in a year where the Patriots are down and the AFC East is wide open – Flores is likely banking on the same thing Coughlin gambled on 16 years ago.
If anything, Fitzpatrick, ever the clever wordsmith, gave the best concession speech of all-time:
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