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The story behind the 700-play highlight reel McDaniel made to save Tua’s shaken confidence

The career-saving, franchise-altering turnaround by Tua Tagovailoa began before the season even began, after the Miami Dolphins hired Mike McDaniel and the new coach started sifting through hundreds and hundreds of plays to give Tagovailoa a reminder of how good he could be.

McDaniel, in a story first detailed by NFL on CBS during its broadcast of the Dolphins’ 30-15 win against the Houston Texans on Sunday, pieced together 700 plays to make a confidence-instilling highlight reel for his new quarterback. There was a reason Tagovailoa was the No. 5 pick in the 2020 NFL Draft and McDaniel wanted to make sure the 24-year-old remembered how good he is.

“You try and put yourself in other people’s shoes as best you can,” McDaniel said. “That’s an important component of being a head coach.”

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For two years, Tagovailoa found himself in about as tough a situation as a young quarterback could. As a rookie, he was coming off a major hip injury and got benched in the middle of games multiple times. In Year 2, he battled injuries again, played behind one of the NFL’s worst offensive lines and tried to ignore all the outside noise as Miami explored a trade for quarterback Deshaun Watson, who was, coincidentally, playing for the Texans at the time.

Tagovailoa admitted to CBS he often found himself looking in the mirror and asking, “Do I suck?” He finished his second season with a relatively pedestrian 90.1 passer rating. It was reasonable to think the Dolphins would look to move on from Tagovailoa after this season if Year 3 didn’t go well because they spent much of his first two seasons looking for someone better, too.

McDaniel didn’t need to be in the building to know it was an awful situation, to know Tagovailoa’s confidence was shaken. His job was save Miami, but also to save Tagovailoa.

“This was not going off of straight fact,” McDaniel said. “This was just using intuition, that getting beat up and having your existence be completely tainted by people saying that you aren’t X, Y or Z and then on top of that, from my vantage point, I felt like he was put behind the eight-ball.”

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His elaboration of the last point was effectively a rebuke of former coach Brian Flores, who’s now the Pittsburgh Steelers’ linebackers coach, and the offense he had Tagovailoa playing in for the previous two years, as well as the all-around toxic situation in South Florida.

“Basically, his strengths — he couldn’t play to,” McDaniel said. “One of the reasons you’ve gotten there is you’re an unbelievable point guard. I felt, how could he, with all the things on? It’s a lot of loud noise that you try to ignore, but people are human.

“Anybody that’s drafted as a quarterback in the top 10, top five — they want to be good. ... Anybody really to be drafted super high and then fall short of the franchise’s expectations — that’s a tough place to live in. That was the motivating factor behind everything.”

Now with the full confidence of a coach and organization behind him, Tagovailoa is living up to the potential the Dolphins (8-3) envisioned when they drafted him in the first round. He’s now up to 2,564 yards and 19 touchdowns, with just three interceptions after throwing for 299 yards and a touchdown in less than three quarters against Houston (1-9-1) at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens.

His confidence is back to where it was when he was the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy and McDaniel saw it building from the preseason, when he was running his offense, McDaniel said, there wasn’t “one example of a quarterback being able to pull off a play that he did.”

Ultimately, he passed off the credit to his quarterback. After all, McDaniel could never have put together a 700-play highlight package if there weren’t already 700 good plays to pick from.

“It was easy. He had the stuff on the tape. I think that’s a credit to him,” McDaniel said. “To his credit, he’s really listened, taken the coaching that he’s good, said, OK, Coach, I believe you, and I think you guys have seen the residuals up close and personal for a while.”

Said Tagovailoa: “I think anyone here can attest to someone believing in them and how that changes how they see themselves, but also things around them. ... It was awesome.”