As concern about Tua Tagovailoa’s health rises, so too does doubt about his NFL future.
The Miami Dolphins quarterback is in the concussion protocol for the second time this season after sustaining a head injury in a loss to the Packers on Sunday. He missed two weeks earlier in the season with a concussion sustained in Week 4 – which came four days after he returned to a game after suffering a back injury that many suspected was also a head injury.
Injuries have been a problem throughout the 24-year-old’s career dating back to college. He’s an undersized player who plays with a commendable amount of fearlessness, but that can sometimes lend itself to dangerous situations.
“The physics aren’t in his favor,” ProFootballTalk NFL insider Mike Florio said Friday in his weekly appearance on “The Joe Rose Show with Zach Krantz.” “When you’re a normal-sized human and you’re being thrown around by 300-pound, superhuman athletes, bad things are going to be able to happen to you. You have to be able to protect yourself, we never saw Drew Brees get ragdolled like that, not that I can remember.
“If you’re going to be a smaller guy playing quarterback in the NFL, it is incumbent on you to get rid of the ball, get down. I admire the courage, but the courage puts you in a position where – that’s why I call it courage, you’re doing things that show no regard for your own health and well-being. That’s courageous, but it also can work against you.”
It’s unclear what’s next for Tagovailoa. He’s out for at least this week’s game against the New England Patriots, with Teddy Bridgewater set to take over in his place. His brother, University of Maryland quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa, said even he doesn’t know what’s next for his brother, but expects that he’ll play again.
That might be his intention, but Florio pointed to the “football machine” potentially leaving him with no choice.
“Guys are rejected by the football machine at all times,” Florio said. “The football machine is this giant apparatus that is made of interchangeable parts that are constantly interchanged. And for every guy that goes out, another guy comes in. Whatever it is, it’s nobody’s fault, it just is what it is.
“If you can’t protect yourself, if you’re going to constantly be concussed, it doesn’t matter if you had posters of Brett Favre on the wall growing up and all you ever dreamed of from the time you were a little boy was to be a pro football player – there are thousands of people who have those same dreams and aspirations. And it’s a narrow-thin margin as to who gets in and who is out.”
That narrow-thin margin, Florio said, might impact Tagovailoa at some point.
“It’s like anything else, the talent has to supersede the negatives, and the negatives are growing to the point where – I feel like it’s coming,” Florio said. “If it hasn’t already happened based on the most recent concussion, I think it’s coming for Tua where it’s all going to be taken and it’s going to be deemed you just can’t play in the NFL. We’re not going to let you play in the NFL.”
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