Tannehill 1 win from Super Bowl, South Florida prepares for pain
My friends, this is painful to write, but we were all wrong about Ryan Tannehill.
Repeat after me: He is a good NFL quarterback. He can take a team to a big win. He is a leader capable of turning around a bad season. He does kind of project a few of the qualities needed in ….
OK, OK, I’ll say it properly: He does project the qualities needed in a winning quarterback. Did I miss anything? Because we have all week to come up with more. And, if next Sunday turns out like Tannehill’s last two games, if his Tennessee Titans team wins and advances to the Super Bowl, get ready for two full weeks of mocking and indignity washed upon South Florida.
We’ll just have to sit there and as hosts of Super Bowl Week, too.
Are you kidding? Tannehill would return to Hard Rock Stadium like Ulysses to Ithaca, like Napoleon to France, like MacArthur to the Philippines — only with a week of media interviews saying how dumb we look to boot.
Wait. Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t write the most unlikely script you could come up with to illustrate the football purgatory we live.
You thought the Not-SigningDrew-Brees storyline was bad for the Miami Dolphins? Tannehill in the Super Bowl would be far worse. For seven long, lonely, fruitless years the Dolphins waited for Tannehill to take that proverbial Next Step as their quarterback.
Turns out the Next Step was to Tennessee.
He didn’t just lead the league in passing this year. He had the fifth-highest quarterback rating in NFL history. He beat the Patriots in New England, something he never did as a Dolphin — and it was in the playoffs! Then he helped beat the No. 1 seeded Baltimore Ravens on Saturday. He’s in the AFC Championship Game next Sunday.
And — here’s the kicker — the Dolphins are paying more than half his salary. They gave him $5 million to go away. Let that sink in. They held onto Tannehill for seven misspent years, paid a team $5 million to take him — and in his first year out he’s winning big.
The Dolphins, meanwhile, tore
down their roster, traded away talent, wasted a season and reconfigured the franchise in hopes of finding a quarterback who could take them into the deepest parts of January. Can they sign Tannehill this offseason?
I’ll pause for you to laugh, cry or roll up in the fetal position.
Give Tanne-ssee credit for doing what the Dolphins didn’t, too. They gave him a good offensive line, great running back, solid defense and had him replace stumbling starter Marcus Mariota around mid-season.
Yep, that’s part of the story, too. Tannehill was humbled out of town to fill a back-up role in Tennessee. But he kept his sense of
self and worked hard enough to become the starter. It reads like a Disney movie where we play Cruella de Vil.
Tannehill, you see, always was good enough if the players around him are good enough. You saw that in 2016 when the power running game of Jay Ajayi complemented his passing enough for a playoff berth (Tannehill tore his anterior cruciate ligament late in the season).
Tannehill followed that imprint in both of Tennessee’s playoff wins. Running back Derrick Henry ran for 182 and 195 yards in the wins. Tannehill has totaled only 160 yards passing in two playoffs games. It hasn’t exactly been a Tour de Tom Brady. But Tannehill’s made some big throws in each. And he’s won. Big.
That’s what it’s all about, right? That’s what he never seemed to do with the Dolphins, right? That’s why he was run out of town — and, let’s not have revisionist history, everyone ran him out of town by the end of his seventh year.
That’s why this story of reclamation and redemption would play so big in the Super Bowl. And be such an indictment on South Florida and, mainly, the Dolphins.
Imagine, too, Tannehill winning the Super Bowl at the stadium he couldn’t win enough in. That’s as the Dolphins de-constructed the past year into a plan of pain to find a franchise quarterback.
Be happy for Tannehill. Be ready to assume the fetal position, South Florida.