The Ryan Tannehill Era in Miami Ends Not with a Bang, but a Whimper

I guess I’m not shocked by this move by the Dolphins, only because they were reportedly in such hot pursuit of Teddy Bridgewater until, after visiting them, he decided he’d rather watch Drew Brees play while he holds a Microsoft Surface than start in Miami.  But I am surprised.

I just have a hard time believing that the Dolphins would so willingly move away from Ryan Tannehill with the only remaining quarterbacks on their roster being the incomparable two-headed monster of Jake Rudock and David Fales. I mean, obviously another move is coming. And they’ll no doubt bring in a short term solution, some quarterback equivalent of Bob from AccountTemps, and draft next year’s starter. I just don’t get why they needed to dump Tannehill now.

The reflex answer is to say “because he sucks,” but I don’t buy that. Tannehill’s never actually been that bad. To me he’s always personified the exact middle. The mean. Or the median. Whichever of those means half the distribution is above you and half is below you. It’s always seemed to me that whatever statistic you looked at for the last six years, Tannehill would be somewhere right in that midpoint of 15th, 16th or 17th in the league. I can only assume that the Dolphins realized he’s never going to move into the top half of the class. Never mind join the elites that will carry a decent team to playoff wins they wouldn’t get with a Mr. Average like him. So why saddle Brian Flores and Chad O’Shea with a guy who’s absolute ceiling is probably 10-6, I guess?

For Tannehill’s part, I don’t get why he wouldn’t just ask for his outright release. At any given time there are at least 6-8 franchises desperate at the position enough to want to take a flyer on a QB who’s not yet 31 and has at least been the vanilla center of the league’s Neapolitan ice cream. I’d have to assume he’d land in a better situation than as Marcus Mariota’s backup. But obviously I’m wrong because he’s taken a pay cut to do exactly that.

I guess you give Dolphins management credit for having the ballsy patience to be at even this early stage of the offseason with no quarterback. So they find themselves in one of those Marco Ramius “When Cortez reached the New World he burned his ships” situations. And how they dig themselves out of it just became the most interesting offseason story line in the AFC East, if not the league.