Without playing a single snap in Week 7 of the 2020 season, the Miami Dolphins were winners on Sunday afternoon. Because the team, who is still hot on the heels of a stunning quarterback change last week that left anyone and everyone covering the league with an opinion of the move, seems to clearly think they can contend for the postseason. Otherwise, why would the Dolphins make this change now? Why would the Dolphins be in hot pursuit of RB Le’Veon Bell in free agency as well?
Miami, presumably smelling blood in the water, made the decision to move away from Ryan Fitzpatrick and install their No. 5 overall pick Tua Tagovailoa into the starting lineup as a potential catalyst for the next 10 games because the team presumably feels there’s plenty of real estate in the standings that is there for the taking.
And based off of Week 7, they’re not wrong.
Their AFC East rivals in New England? Shelled by 27 points by a team Miami had just beaten by 26 two weeks prior. The Patriots are now 2-4 and haven’t won a game since Week 3. The division leading Buffalo Bills? They had to scrap out an 8-point win over the lowly New York Jets, who may not win an entire game this season. Buffalo trailed at the half and looked out of sync against the Jets — with unforced errors by New York tilting the game to Buffalo’s favor. The Browns endured a tough loss with an injury to star WR Odell Beckham Jr. in their Week 7 win; leaving Beckham to join star RB Nick Chubb on the sidelines for the time being. The Las Vegas Raiders melted under the pressure against Tom Brady, giving up 45 points and falling to 3-3 on the season. But they’ve now given up 197 points in 6 games; 84 more than the Dolphins. Just once all season have the Raiders conceded less than 30 points in a single game.
It’s all there for the taking for the Dolphins, and former New York Jets and Buffalo Bills head coach Rex Ryan said it best about the Dolphins’ quarterback change:
PART 2 pic.twitter.com/UA4u1aSBp2
— DolphinsTalk.com (@DolphinsTalk) October 25, 2020
“They want to be special. Brian Flores is looking at it like, ‘why not us? Why can’t we win the division?’ … Ryan Fitzpatrick, we never know what we’re going to get. And anybody who says ‘oh you’re going to get this type of play out of (Fitzpatrick)’ over a period has never played against this guy,” said Ryan on ESPN ahead of the Week 7 games.
“To me, they drafted a guy to be special. Ryan Fitzpatrick is not special. I don’t care about what the numbers say the last three weeks.”
And while Ryan Fitzpatrick has, generally speaking, played some of the best football of his career with the Dolphins, you still do get some of the frustrating inconsistencies in Fitzpatrick’s game that you wouldn’t expect from a 16-year NFL veteran. None of this diminishes what Ryan Fitzpatrick has done for the Dolphins — he’s an invaluable piece of the puzzle who should be thanked by Dolphins fans for what he did to get Miami to this point so quickly.
But as the Dolphins chase their aspirations of bigger and better than “okay” in 2020, the incubation period for Tagovailoa has, in the eyes of Brian Flores and the rest of the Dolphins organization, provided enough time to where the floor (or the ceiling) with Tagovailoa surpasses that of Fitzpatrick. And with everything out in front of the Dolphins, now is the time to make the move — and hope that their young quarterback is everything they’d hoped he’d be.