A successful year for Tua Tagovailoa won’t look like Burrow or Herbert’s

What would qualify as a successful rookie season for Tua Tagovailoa?

The 2020 rookie quarterback class is set in stone. And Tua Tagovailoa will be judged this year very differently than Justin Herbert and Joe Burrow.

Tagovailoa isn’t going to be judged by the same metrics as the other rookie quarterbacks.

And just to clarify, I’m not including Jordan Love. He’s not going to see the field this year, and it could be several years before he gets his chance.

Let’s start with Joe Burrow, though, and this will be quick. He’s going to be the Day 1 starter; I don’t think there any many counterarguments for that. And I’m convinced he’s going to have a stellar rookie season; he’ll be in contention for Offensive Rookie of the Year.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s move on to Justin Herbert. He, too, will be a Day 1 starter, but it won’t be as concrete as Burrow leading up to the beginning of the season. There’ll be some mild talk about Tyrod Taylor getting first-team snaps and him being the starter, but it’ll boil down to Herbert coming out of the gate, once it’s all said and done. We’ve all seen this before.

As for Herbert, I think it’ll be a tumult-filled season as he makes his adjustments to the NFL.

Now, it’s time for Tua Tagovailoa. His situation is different. I don’t have to remind everyone about his hip injury, so we’ll skip the nitty-gritty of it. All reports have been outstanding as Tagovailoa heals from the injury he got last fall, which is great.

But how do you handle it delicately and optimally? And this is an open forum question. If he’s 100% and has a better training camp than Ryan Fitzpatrick, it makes sense to start him. But anything less than a perfect training camp might support the idea of sitting Tua Tagovailoa for a while.

I’m siding with caution. Nick Saban pushed his luck with this decision last fall against Mississippi State, and that teachable moment resonates even louder now that Tagovailoa is a Dolphin. I certainly won’t nitpick if he’s named the starter, but I am taking into consideration all the context before choosing who’s the ringleader when kickoff rolls around.

I haven’t even mentioned COVID-19 and those possible implications and how it could affect training camp. It’s already truncated the preseason, which has been a time to shine for fringe players and for big-ticket names to knock off the cobwebs.

Not that my word holds any weight, but I’m taking it slow and steady for the Tua Tagovailoa era. And a success for him and the introduction of the new era is Tagovailoa playing eight games. I think that’s a reasonable bar to set.

It’s enough time for Tagovailoa to soak up the sights and sounds of how the NFL operates going into his professional career earlier in the season. It’s also enough time for him to take the training wheels off, jump in, and make a difference in the later parts of the season if the Dolphins prove to be a surprisingly scabrous force in the league.

I won’t even get into stat predictions. That’s not what this is about. Let Tagovailoa get some playing time and allow the process to unfurl naturally. I’ll worry about the stats once he’s got his feet wet.