Tagovailoa’s private workout hailed as ‘great’
Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa showed improved health and excellent accuracy during his private Pro Day Thursday. Will it be enough for the Miami Dolphins to take him with the NFL Draft’s fifth pick?
ESPN has obtained and disseminated video from Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s private pro day workout, and it jibes with what he, his doctors and representatives have been saying for weeks:
That Tagovailoa’s health concerns “are overblown” and that he “checks out fine with the doctors who have spent time with him since the Combine,” as his agent Leigh Steinberg said on 790 The Ticket’s Hochman and Crowder program Thursday.
“Great tape for him,” former NFL quarterback and current ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky wrote on Twitter.
“2 main questions were 1could he still be so efficient & 2-could he still be so sudden/ powerful? Both are strong yes. Throws that matter most-12-1520 yards were best. They’re always NFL accurate. In a 4 inch by 4 inch box.”
Added former Chargers team physician David Chao, who is not affiliated with Tagovailoa’s camp: “Great to see @Tuaamann doing well. No way his hip is 100% yet but on track to be ready for season. If he doesn’t start, it will likely be a front office/coaching decision with no offseason program than physical limitation.”
As for training camp (whenever that begins in this new coronavirus reality), Tagovailoa will be a go. That’s according to two of his surgeons, who told ESPN that the Alabama quarterback would be fully healthy to participate for the start of camp.
“He’s in a normal offseason
training program just getting his body back in shape now,” said Lyle Cain, the head team physician at the University of Alabama.
The video shows Tagovailoa working under center and out of the shotgun, and showed mobility with bootlegs, standard dropbacks, play-action, readoption simulations. His arm is as accurate and lively as ever.
Trent Dilfer, the former NFL quarterback who has helped prepare Tagovailoa for the NFL Draft, told ESPN’s Chris Mortensen that he put Tagovailoa through a 72-throw workout.
Receivers ran 52 routes. A third-party quarterback charted Tagovailoa’s accuracy, and found that 38 of the 52 were perfect, onthe-face throws; 11 were good enough for run-afterthe-catch possibilities, one was a throw in which the the receiver made Tagovailoa look good and two were misses.
“I then had him throw 5, 47-yard rip shots off a big pocket lateral movement so he couldn’t crow hop into it [longest throw I could create in the condensed indoor],” Dilfer wrote to Mortensen. “4 of the 5 finished on the head with hardly any arc to ball [1 finished at the knees].
“His drop the mic throw was his last of the day. His 72nd throw was a 5-step drop, lateral move to his left, then flat sprint right and throw it 40 yards moving full speed away from his arm side. He ripped a DIME!
“This kid has as much horsepower as you could ever want and incredible twitch to go with it. I’ve never been around a kid that throws it better.”
Was it good enough to convince the Dolphins to take him in the top 10? We won’t know for a couple more weeks. But many around the league remain skeptical about using a high draft pick on such a big injury risk.
In a conversation with WQAM’s Joe Rose and Zach Krantz, former Patriots and Raiders executive Mike Lombardi suggested that drafting Tagovailoa as high as No. 5 would be too risky.
Lombardi reported earlier this week that Tagovailoa failed the physical exams of two teams and had two significant wrist injuries that weren’t reported. The Miami Herald’s Armando Salguero confirmed that Tagovailoa did indeed sustain one of those wrist injuries.
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Lombardi told Rose. “They know it’s true! I didn’t make the injuries up — the wrist, the knee, the finger, ankle, the hip, I’m not inventing this. This is what happens. Football is a violent sport. Some guys have an ability to stand back up and some guys get hurt.
”It’s not can Tua pass the physical? That’s not the question to answer. Leigh Steinberg and David Ogelbee, the great advertising agency, are working together on this: They’re saying he’s healthy now. They’re not saying he’s going to stay healthy. A lot of guys pass physicals. A lot of guys can’t stay healthy!
”The game is only going to get more violent; it’s only going to get more competitive. They are not playing mercy, which [Alabama] did. You are not playing Coastal Carolina in the NFL. You are not going to be playing Louisiana-Lafayette. You are going to have to stay in there and take all the hits. It’s an endurance test playing quarterback in the NFL. You’ve got to have a great lower body. You’ve got to be able to stand in there with strength in your lower body and be able to drive the ball Week 14 when you’ve taken a lot of hits.”
Lombardi reiterated that “there’s one team in the top 10 that took him off the board, and they need a quarterback. They said, ‘Look, it’s too much risk.’ Another team said I’m not going to risk a first roundpick for a guy and pray every day he’s not going to get hurt.
“He’s been at Alabama 32 games. Of those games, he threw less than 20 times in 14 games. Those were games that were pretty much controlled. Nine of those games, he threw it 10 times. When you boil his career down, because they were so dominant, he probably played in 18 games.”
Lombardi added: ”So what quarterback should they take? You can’t invent him. You just take a really good player. You are never going to get fired for taking a great player. You are going to get fired for taking an uncalculated risk. Anybody, whether it’s Trent Dilfer, Steinberg that says Tua will last his career and not get hurt, they can’t make that prediction. The science is on the side of he will get hurt because past performance predicts future performance. If I were the Dolphins, I would make a really good pick at that pick ... and trade that pick back and collect more assets. We’re not doing it to win next year; we’re doing it for the long haul.”