At least the Cleveland Browns suck as much now as they did then.
As had been discussed in the weekly NFL threads recently, QB Tua Tagovailoa’s days as a Dolphin look to be numbered; it now sounds like he’s ready to be out of Miami.
He’d not played well this season, and was a healthy inactive/emergency third QB for the season’s final three games, while the Dolphins started rookie Quinn Ewers. Today, while the Dolphins’ players were cleaning out their lockers, a reporter asked Tua if he’d like a fresh start.
His response was, “That would be dope. I’d be good with it.”
The Dolphins would face a massive dead-cap hit if they cut him, as they need to account for the remaining guaranteed $99.2 million on his contract. It seems unlikely that they’ll find a trade suitor, given Tagovailoa’s contract, his concussion history, and his declining play.
Ever since the Rams and Chargers moved back to LA, I keep getting the two teams mixed up. It’s the combination of the same city, same stadium and same colours.
Heck, when I see LAR on the screen my mind says LA Raiders.
The Colts 42 seasons in Indy? Damn, I feel old, too.
I don’t know how self-aware he is, but it really seems like it would be in his best interests to somehow agree to restructure his contract to make it more trade-friendly.
Of course, it would REALLY be in his life best interests to take the money and retire so as not to take more hits to the head, but I doubt he’s going to do that.
I’m sure he’d love to from his end, but any such “re-structure” would be equivalent to a contract extension, i.e. spreading that hit over more years by converting some of it to an immediate bonus plus spreading the rest of it out over more years, i.e. the opposite of what trading teams would want, except the bonus bit. Worse Miami doesn’t have much cap space as it is to convert any part of his contract to immediate bonus unless they completely gut the rest of their current roster, including players they’d rather keep.
Basically, a contract restructure would be counter-productive for Miami, but great for Tua. Miami will have to pay, one way or another, for their bad decisions. Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Or, I suppose there is, but it involves a team voluntarily taking on his terrible contract terms.
ETA: the best option for Miami, if they’re convinced they’re done with him, is actually a re-structure along the above lines - they pay part of the cap hit as converted bonus and find a team willing to take him as a post-June 1 trade (when that $99M reduces to under $70M). That still leaves them a massive cap hit but not a record breaking hit.
Yeah, I guess what I was thinking was that, if Tua really wants to play again in the next two years, he should agree to void his contract, get traded to another team, and sign a new contract with that team. Otherwise, I suspect he’s going to get paid $90 mil to run the Miami scout team for two years.
Players can’t void their own contracts that way. Other teams would cry foul. As would the players union. There’s a CBA for a reason. If a team could get out of cap situations like this, they would pressuring players and their own accounting departments to pull shenanigans like this all the time. Contracts should be contracts (even if NFL contracts are still plenty shady) - bad decisions have to be paid for one way or another.
Tua can retire, which suspends his current contract, but that contract would come back in force when he “unretires”. And he wouldn’t be paid in the interim. He can also just not play but Miami would still be on the hook for the dead cap.
If Miami didn’t want to be on the hook for him in 2026, they shouldn’t have extended him two years ago. As for Tua, it makes no sense to walk away from tens of millions of dollars he won’t get from any new team. If people didn’t suspect brain damage before, they sure as heck would after.
Yeah, I get it. I’m thinking of it from a perspective of how much does he actually want to play vs. get paid. Because I don’t think he’s going to play for Miami in any meaningful sense again. But you understand how contracts work a lot more than I do, so from what I can see I suspect he’s going to be the most highly paid backup since, well, I guess Deshaun Watson 
More or less. Watson was technically on IR most of last season and this one 
Denver might be more an example. They took a ridiculous cap hit to unload Russell Wilson’s contract. He cost them about $27-28M more dollars THIS season against the cap than Bo Nix! They ended up paying $53M last season against the cap and another $32M this season for Wilson’s dead cap. That can’t feel great for Wilson. Plus they were paying him north of $30M in 2024 to play QB on another team and he’s still the most expensive QB by far against their cap this season.
But they’ve got a better brain trust running things over there than in Miami and clearly they had a workable plan and some combination of skill/luck in drafting and signing free agents and managing their cap space.
Yeah, the Dolphins and Browns are in a similar (if not identical) situation: they have quarterbacks that they very likely don’t want anymore, to whom they owe a metric crap-ton of money, because they signed said quarterbacks to ill-advised contracts.
And, both quarterbacks likely have zero trade value, as the market for a quarterback with an enormous contract, who is several years removed from having posted a productive season (Watson is now five years removed from his last good season, with the Texans in 2020), and is either (a) a horrible human being, or (b) carrying a history of significant head injuries, is effectively non-existent.
Assuming that the QBs don’t retire, both teams are going to be in serious dead-cap hell for the next year or two, and it’s just a question of if they decide to take the beating in one season, or spread it out over two seasons; the only other viable option is just to carry the guy on the roster, even if he doesn’t play, and that, really, is just a different flavor of dead-cap money.
In coaching news: the Cowboys have fired defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus.
Eberflus, who had been an assistant coach with the Cowboys earlier in his career, rejoined the Dallas staff this season, after being fired as the Bears’ head coach midway through last season.
Dallas’s defense was pretty bad this year (trading away Micah Parsons likely didn’t help): they finished in last place in points allowed, and in 30th place in yards allowed.
The DC position has been a revolving door in Dallas, and whoever they hire will be the fourth DC in four seasons.
When I see “LAC” I think “LA Clippers”
This. And it’s not like this was an unforeseeable conclusion. In 2022, he missed significant time and was clearly not right. Yes, in 2023 he was able to play out the entire season, but a 4-year extension seemed crazy. That’s a hell of a gamble, and it didn’t pay off. I would have considered a 2-year extension to be fair, and if they’d done that, they’d still have been stuck with dead cap money, but in a much more reasonable situation. Whoever decided that a single year of him being “okay” meant it was smart to commit four years to him was an idiot.
While this situation isn’t as bad as the Watson deal as far as a financial burden, and not nearly as obvious (nobody outside of Cleveland thought that Watson contract was a good deal, it would have been a miracle for it to not be a disaster), there are still enough parallels that folks in Miami have got to be slapping their foreheads.
In other news, I got tickets to the first Seahawk game in two weeks!
Congratulations! Please tell us how it goes. My last in-person game was watching them come back from a 21-point deficit to beat the Buccaneers in 2013. Such an amazing game and a fun day. I loved high-fiving strangers.
I gave up my half of a season ticket package a few years ago because I actually don’t love being at the stadium that much (and it’s quite a distance from my home). Too much constant hype by the stadium crew. Too many drunk fans. Good but not great seats. But, I’m looking forward to a playoff game nonetheless. There is something a bit wild about being there in person that is fun, even for this old guy.
I haven’t attended an NFL playoff since 2012, and never at Gillette. But our town has some access to tickets, and today I got an email saying that a few tickets had freed up at face value. Scanning the stadium there were maybe 30 available? I called my adult son, he said he’d go, and I snapped up two on the 40-yard line.
He’s been a fan since around 2007, but never attended a playoff, so this will be an excellent time…even if it’ll be cold and wet.
(and most likely a better experience than watching RG3 go down with a knee injury in a losing battle, which was my last playoff game)
The 49ers beat writers and podcasters I listen to are untied in their pessimism, ALL writing this off as a guaranteed loss. It’s hilarious that the crossover episodes with their Eagles counterparts have those guys equally disappointed with their team and predicting a 49ers win.
I’m not listening to anything else until next Thursday.
I don’t bet but I’d put money on the Niners if I did bet. I think they’re the better team, even beaten up, and they’re at least getting Trent Williams back it looks like.