Tua Tagovailoa and the Miami Dolphins suffered an early exit from the NFL playoffs once again. And Fox’s Nick Wright is officially tired of the “bulls****ing” from fans trying to defend the inconsistent southpaw quarterback.
To Wright, Miami’s road loss to the Kansas City Chiefs last weekend was the final evidence he needed that Tagovailoa does not belong in the top tier of NFL game breakers.
“I think that there is a level of if you watch a lot of football, you’re like, ‘well he’s small, doesn’t have a big arm … can’t really run,'” Wright explained on The Colin Cowherd Podcast. “And he needs everything to be perfect for it to work.”
Wright watched as analysts tried to paint Tagovailoa as the NFL MVP around the halfway point of the season. And he thought it was all baloney, even before Miami’s loss to the Chiefs.
“There was to me a push, especially about midway through this year, where folks in our profession would almost do this rhetorical thing [of], ‘What more do you want him to do? Leads the league in passer rating, leads the league in this stat. What more does he have to do to convince you?'” Wright explained. ”
“Either you’re just doing a Captain Easy stance … or you, I feel, have a fundamental misunderstanding of how football works. because what I want him to do is something I think he’s physically incapable of doing, which is be one of the eight to 10 human beings alive that when s*** is bad and you have to just make it happen, you can. And we know he can’t. And so it’s like, what can he do? Unfortunately the answer is nothing.”
Wright wants Tagovailoa defenders to cut the crap once and for all until the former Heisman winner can prove he’s actually deserving of that praise.
“People would try to be like, ‘you’re underrating his eyes and what he does to try to move defenders.’ And I’m like, you’re just bulls****ing,” Wright added. “You’re just saying all these things because you agree with me that if a game comes down to can you make the throws, you don’t have the guy.”
Now, Wright’s notorious Chiefs fandom may be at play here. It’s easy to kick the opponent down after your team beats them.
But Cowherd chimed in to note that Tagovailoa is also an easy person for the media to prop up. He’s an underdog story and by all accounts a kindhearted young guy. The Dolphins have been downtrodden for years. Their return to prominence is a good narrative.
Still, Wright is steadfast in his anti-system quarterback takes. Tagovailoa is benefitting from the same great structure that Brock Purdy is, and Wright has come out against Purdy all year.
For now, Dolphins fans and Tagovailoa lovers in NFL media probably have to take the L.
[The Colin Cowherd Podcast on YouTube]
