New Miami Dolphins general manager: ‘I have a lot of respect for Tua’
In his first press conference since becoming Miami Dolphins general manager, Jon-Eric Sullivan got asked the question that’s been hanging over the NFL franchise since Dec. 17. That’s when Miami coach Mike McDaniel benched quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, playing on a $212.4 million contract extension, for seventh-round rookie Quinn Ewers.
McDaniel is no longer with the Dolphins. He’s been replaced by former Green Bay Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley. Tagovailoa remains on the roster, and the new general manager didn’t shut the door on the former Alabama All-American regaining the starting job. But Sullivan didn’t restore Tagovailoa to franchise-QB status either.
“Obviously, that’s a huge question looming over the organization,” Sullivan said on Thursday when asked to address the Dolphins’ quarterback situation. “And I’d be naive to think that everybody doesn’t understand that. I have a lot of respect for Tua. He’s a good football player. He’s accomplished a lot in this league. I think whether it’s Tua or anybody else, it’s unfair and irresponsible for me to sit up here and talk about anything specific before I’ve talked to the player himself.
“Quarterback is the most important position in professional sports. I also think it’s the most dependent. These guys heard me say this in the interview process: We will evaluate that position like we evaluate every other position, and we will do what is best for this football team with Tua or anybody else. To sit up here today and tell you that I have a great understanding of what we’re going to do or which way we’re going to go, that would be a lie because there’s just too much work to do. There’s too many conversations to be had at this point.
“A lot of respect for Tua, what he’s accomplished in this league. I thought Quinn did a great job at the end of the season. We have to figure that out. We will. But today is not the day I can give you that answer.”
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The Dolphins acquired Tagovailoa with the fifth pick in the 2020 NFL Draft, and he served as the starting quarterback, when healthy, from the sixth game of his rookie season until getting benched with three games left in the 2025 campaign.
Tagovailoa had the NFL’s best passing-efficiency rating in 2022. In 2023, he led the NFL with 4,624 passing yards and earned Pro Bowl recognition.
After that season, the Dolphins signed the quarterback to a four-year, $212.4 million contract extension
In 2024, a concussion and a hip injury kept Tagovailoa out of six games, but he placed fourth in the league in average passing yards per game and had the NFL’s highest completion percentage.
In 2025, Tagovailoa’s completion rate of 67.7 percent was 5 percent lower, his interception rate more than doubled and he averaged 70.6 fewer passing yards per game than he did the previous season.
Tagovailoa completed 260-of-384 passes for 2,660 yards with 20 touchdowns and 15 interceptions for a passing-efficiency rating of 88.5. When he was pulled from the lineup, Tagovailoa had thrown the most interceptions in the NFL and ranked seventh in completion percentage, 17th in passing yards, 16th in touchdown passes and 22nd in passing-efficiency rating among the NFL’s quarterbacks.
When Tagovailoa went to the bench, Miami had a 6-8 record on its way to its 25th consecutive season without a playoff victory.
Miami used Ewers to start the final three games on the 2025 schedule. The Dolphins won one of those games as Ewers completed 50-of-75 passes for 569 yards with three touchdowns and three interceptions for a passing-efficiency rating of 85.9.
If Tagovailoa is with the Dolphins two months from now, he’ll cost Miami $57 million. His contract includes a guarantee of $54 million for the 2026 season, and $3 million of his 2027 salary becomes guaranteed if Tagovailoa is on the team’s roster three days after the next free-agency period begins in March.
If the Dolphins release Tagovailoa before then, he will count $99.2 million against their 2026 salary cap – about one-third of the team’s total to spend and $42.8 million more than if he is on the team. Some NFL bookkeeping regulations could reduce that number to $67.4 million in 2026, with the other $31.8 million in dead money kicked down the road to the 2027 salary cap if he’s designated as a June 1 release.
Even if he’s traded, Tagovailoa will count $45.2 million against Miami’s 2026 salary cap.
“It always starts with the quarterback,” Sullivan said. “Anybody that’s in this business will tell you that. But we’ll build this from the inside out. I think you have to do that. I think you have to make sure that your line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball is big, tough, resilient and that there’s depth so that you can survive — it’s a violent game; there’s going to be injuries — that you can survive injuries.
“The thing that I think we have to focus most on right now is making sure that we build infrastructure. And, yes, we need to get the quarterback situation in place, but we’re not going to do it in an irresponsible manner where we sacrifice building the infrastructure of this football team, so that when we do find our guy, he can go be successful. We’ve all seen teams that go about it maybe in a questionable manner and you get a really good player at quarterback, but he can’t stay healthy because he’s getting killed or he doesn’t have anybody to throw to.
“So, yes, we will find our guy, but we’re going to make sure that we’re building the infrastructure along the way, so when we do find our trigger-man, whoever that may be, whether it’s Tua, Quinn or somebody that’s not in the building, we have a team that he can go play with and win with.”
Sullivan became the general manager for the Dolphins after 22 seasons in player development with the Packers. During that time, Green Bay had three primary quarterbacks – Brett Favre, Aaron Rodgers and Jordan Love. Sullivan saw Rodgers and Love get drafted while his predecessor was still an all-star.
Sullivan said he planned to follow the Packers’ quarterback model.
“I’ve learned, if you can help it, don’t wait till you don’t have a quarterback to find one,” Sullivan said. “It starts there. If you think about what we did with Aaron, I watched Ted Thompson. I referred to him earlier talking about him always doing what is best for the team even when it’s not popular. You got to remember Brett was still in place and playing at a very high level, and there were a lot of people in that building that didn’t think drafting a quarterback who was going to sit for an extended amount of time with a first-round pick made a lot of sense with where we were as a team. And he did in that moment what he knew was best for the Green Bay Packers. And the rest speaks, you know, history speaks for itself. And then we turned around and did it again with Jordan. You know, we had Aaron. So it starts there, right?
“The quarterback position again is the most important position in sports in my opinion. Certainly, the most important position in football. We’re going to invest in that position every year if we can. Now depending on where we are as a football team, it’ll be at different values, but we will draft quarterbacks every year, if not every other year, because I think you have to. If you hit on a guy, great. And if not — if you hit on two, you have trade value. I think if you look at the history of the Green Bay Packers all the way back to Ron Wolf, I mean Brett Favre’s backups were Matt Hasselback, Kurt Warner, Aaron Brooks, Ty Detmer, you can go on down the line.
“I can’t say enough about the importance of it, and we’ll be very active in acquiring quarterbacks to make sure that that room is deep — as deep as we can make it.”
