The purpose of tanking is to get great players. Josh Rosen could still become a great player, but the Miami Dolphins had no intention of finding out.
Each time a team has traded for Josh Rosen during his short NFL career, it’s been hailed as a bargain. And each team that’s acquired him has subsequently wasted his talent and a year of his career. On Thursday, the Dolphins named Rosen their starting quarterback for Week 3, two weeks too late and only after designing a scheme to strip this franchise down completely.
The Dolphins are choosing to lose games. It was evident when they originally installed Ryan Fitzpatrick as their starter and again when they traded three of their best players this month. That’s not the problem. More pressing is the question of what exactly they’re trying to do at quarterback and what their plan is at the position long-term.
The goal of tanking should be not only to juice your draft position, but to develop the young talent on the roster in the meantime. Miami seems to actively not care about the 53 guys on the roster this season, especially Rosen.
They are setting them up to fail.
The Cleveland Browns can point to the value of the 2016 and ’17 seasons from the standpoint of helping to grow youngsters such as David Njoku, Joe Schobert and Myles Garrett. They saw Duke Johnson develop into a versatile running back and dealt him for a likely third-round pick in 2020. The offensive line questions that plagued Cleveland through training camp would be a lot worse if J.C. Tretter and Joel Bitonio didn’t grow together during that 1-31 stretch.
Of course, the Browns didn’t execute their tank perfectly. It probably shouldn’t take losing 44 games over three seasons to find a franchise quarterback. Still, Cleveland is set up in a much better position now than it seems like Miami is even interested in being in the near future.
Rosen has significantly more upside than any of the flotsam quarterbacks who came through Cleveland under Sashi Brown. Still, rather than take advantage of getting a top-10 quarterback on the cheap, the Dolphins failed to maximize the situation around Rosen. Miami’s offensive coordinator is longtime Patriots wide receivers coach Chad O’Shea, who has never called plays in the NFL before. Rosen’s weapons are highlighted, if that’s the right word, by Kenyan Drake and DeVante Parker, two young veterans who haven’t really flashed at all in the NFL. The rest of the field is dotted with complete question marks such as Jakeem Grant and Kallen Ballage.
These are all problems the Dolphins saw coming and didn’t avoid. The offensive line tasked with protecting Rosen will challenge Arizona’s for most likely to derail his career due to injury. After dumping Laremy Tunsil the week before the start of the season, Miami won’t be starting a single player drafted higher than the third round on the line.
One would expect the defense to improve over the course of the year (it’s currently 30th in Football Outsiders’ DVOA), as it’s made up of mostly high Dolphins draft picks. However, Miami decimated that group as well when it traded standout defensive back Minkah Fitzpatrick. Cornerback Xavien Howard, who’s intercepted 11 passes over the past two seasons, summed it up nicely:
Though Miami has no chance of winning many games, it was a sham that it started Fitzpatrick initially. The quarterback decision was a lose-lose proclamation with so little roster talent, but if you’re tanking, you’re selling hope. Rosen presented two paths toward hope: The unlikely possibility that he looked like an above-average quarterback even with so little talent around him, or that he at least showed enough to be flipped again in the 2020 offseason. After tossing him out there in garbage time of Weeks 1 and 2, neither possibility seems likely. Instead, Rosen will likely continue to look terrible, tank his trade value, and make Dolphins fans wonder why the team ever traded for him in the first place.
The Dolphins did this to themselves. They traded for Rosen all the way back on draft night, when they still had the chance to bring in coaches who were familiar with Rosen or could figure out a way to use him. Several decent skill position players were available after final roster cuts, and instead of looking there, Miami was focused on making its team worse by dealing good players away, and didn’t add to their staff of former Patriots coaches.
At the end of the year, Miami can move on from Rosen again and rinse its hands. All it traded was a third-round pick, and tanking is still the right move. It’s bad business to leave Rosen out to dry, but if it results in Tua Tagovailoa or Justin Herbert, the Dolphins won’t mind.
Still, considering the immediacy and potency of Miami’s tank, it’s worth wondering whether someone like Tagovailoa will be insulated enough to develop correctly.
The Dolphins and general manager Chris Grier have proven they never cared about Rosen, but are they executing this plan well enough to win with a great quarterback when they find one?