Well, that’s certainly an interesting take, but nowhere near as eye-catching as his comments when asked whether Tua can be an elite quarterback.
“I can’t say he can’t be,” Grier said. “It’s in a situation now where this will be built around his skill set and what the offense can be and Mike’s vision of how he fits. So, I wouldn’t say he can’t be. It’s too early. He’s played 20 games maybe. The first year was in and out and missing games this year, but I know he’s won games even this last year, and it’s hard to win games in this league. I know people want to say he doesn’t throw the ball downfield, but he’s incredibly accurate, and that’s the real exciting part for Mike and the coaching staff, his accuracy.”
Yeah, sure, maybe it’s too early to say whether Tua WILL be an elite quarterback, but is it really too early to say he CAN be?
Wouldn’t that have been the way to go to put the exclamation point on the franchise fully supporting their quarterback?
Was it perhaps a matter of Grier not wanting to put high expectations on Tagovailoa? If the answer is yes, we’ll have to disagree because Tua wasn’t selected with the fifth overall pick in the 2020 draft with the idea he couldn’t be an elite quarterback. On the contrary, that sort of comes with the territory.
Understand that Grier is a soft-spoken, low-key GM not prone to making big declarations, but it’s safe to say that nobody would have faulted him for saying that, yes, Tua can become an elite quarterback. That’s not the same as saying that Tua definitely will become elite, but would anybody really have come back at Grier down the road had he said yes and things didn’t work out that way for whatever reason?
In the grand scheme of things, this probably won’t matter because it’s probably more important that the head coach believe in the quarterback than the GM, but the ideal scenario obviously would be for everybody to be on board.
As it is, Grier already had partially gone down that road by shutting down the Watson trade talk and declaring that Tua was the man in 2022. While one could argue that should have been enough to show Grier is fully behind Tua, it says here it wouldn’t have hurt for him to take the extra step.
:quality(70)/d1hfln2sfez66z.cloudfront.net/05-26-2022/t_32cb8329b6ee455689ecea29e8f9e219_name_file_1920x1080_1200_v3_1_.jpg "Man pulled from Great Miami River in Piqua – WHIO TV 7 and WHIO Radio")