Hyde: Dolphins keeping noise away from Tua
Amid the outside noise, there’s a lowered volume inside around Dolphins’ Tua
MIAMI GARDENS — Turn off the noise and nonsense. Ignore the endless hype and hope. Step into a Miami Dolphins practice to see who has volume with the most valued.
Only then can you understand what’s at work at the very core of the blueprint to raise this franchise. Only then do you see the industrial cog move through its daily motions. How much is trust rationed?
Who has a voice around The Anointed One?
Tua Tagovailoa does drills with, talks in practice constantly among and gets play calls into his helmet from Charlie Frye, his one-time quarterback coach at summer camps who the Miami Dolphins hired this offseason.
He also talks at practice with his boss and, if this works out, his business partner in coach Brian Flores. They point here. They trade a few lines there. They might even smile at times.
You also see the second-year quarterback trade some talk, here and there, sometimes in passing, with one of the offensive coordinators, George Godsey.
But that’s about it beyond, of course, his teammates who are busy with their own business. That seems the inner core of those with access to the inner sanctum. Three men. No more.
That’s how it should be, too — how it has to be so the message remains pure and the young quarterback’s head stays uncluttered. It’s the only way to maintain patience and perspective amid all the applied pressure.
Too many voices is like too many cooks, or chiefs, or whatever cliché you want to apply.
Tua was asked an innocent question Wednesday about if he’s worked with team advisor Dan Marino on footwork in the pocket. Marino, of course, couldn’t run much but he had the footwork of Baryshnikov in the phone booth of a pocket.
“No, I’ve never got the chance to work with Dan,” he said.
He went on to quickly add, “But Dan will have some input. He’s true veteran. He’s gone in our meetings and helped us as quarterbacks.”
Don’t misread that. It’s no slap at Marino. He’s an understated counsel befitting his role. It’s just telling that going into Tua’s second season the curtain around him is that tight, the involved plan that airtight.
You can see why, right? Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner was once asked how he went from an Arena Football quarterback to a Super Bowl winner.
“I quit listening to everyone,” he said.
The Dolphins have tried to cut off that potential problem around Tua. They had everyone quit talking around him except those who matter.
Only a few matter, too. All this incessant noise around
him gets filtered in the process. And, really, have many young quarterbacks had more infernal noise around them than Tua? Seemingly every day there’s some contrived media debate between someone saying he’s already a bust and someone saying he’s on his way to elite status.
Tua, meanwhile, doesn’t change his line. He tries to improve each day. That’s his practice mantra, and Wednesday’s subject could be boiled down to one idea.
“Overall just the communication, the operation with us offensively,” he said. “It still needs some cleanup. But really that’s what it’s been [Wednesday].”
It’s not the sexiest topic, nor one easily understood outside the confines of his huddle. But isn’t that how you eat an elephant? One bit at a time?
And how do you protect a young quarterback? Exactly how the Dolphins are doing it.
“Organizations make quarterbacks,” Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh said while constructing two Hall of Famers, Joe Montana and then Steve Young, in San Francisco.
The Dolphins had a broken organization for Ryan Tannehill. The idea is to have a better one for Tua. The offensive line has been invested in, the receiving unit has been added to.
And all that noise on the outside?
The volume is turned down to a few voices around him on the inside.