The Miami Dolphins have benched Tua Tagovailoa. This comes not too long after theCardinals soft-benched Kyler Murray, though Arizona ostensibly had the excuse of a lingering foot sprain to justify the their decision.
Both moves are proof of something that the rest of the NFL needs to learn: Don't pay franchise-quarterback money to players who are not franchise quarterbacks.
There was a time when this wasn't necessarily the biggest issue in the NFL world, but quarterback salaries have exploded to a point where paying a quarterback market value makes it difficult to build the perfect lineup around him. I mean, just look at the AFC playoff picture: The top two seeds have second-year quarterbacks on rookie deals. Building around a cheap quarterback contract like that has always been a cheat code, but it seems to be even more of one now.
Teams need to be careful about paying big money to quarterbacks
Dak Prescott is the highest-paid quarterback in the NFL. He's a very good one, but the Cowboys are 6-7-1 on the season thanks in large part to the team's defensive woes. With that said, Prescott has done enough to prove that while he might be overpaid, he's not that overpaid.
Not like Tagovailoa, at least. The left-handed passer is the NFL's sixth-highest-paid quarterback, with a 2025 salary of $53.1 million. That puts him ahead of guys like Jared Goff, Justin Herbert and Lamar Jackson. It's pretty clearly a bad deal, and that was true even before he was benched. Heck, it was true the moment he signed on the dotted line.
But Miami likely felt like it had to lock Tua up. The team was in that weird purgatory: not really a Super Bowl contender, but also without a path to being bad enough to land a top quarterback in the draft. Rather than walk into the QB wilderness, without any idea of how long it would last, the Dolphins felt like the only way to be "good" was to pay a lot of money to keep Tagovailoa around.
That deal was signed in the summer of 2024. Less than two years later, Miami either have to go into 2026 resigned to the fact that they'll have to just start Tagovailoa again for a lame duck year or they'll have to eat a huge chunk of his deal to get rid of him. Neither situation is great.
Managing the quarterback position in the NFL
You likely need one of two things to win games in the modern NFL: either a true franchise quarterback, or a cheap player on a rookie-scale deal. To have anything in between is to place yourself in a kind of football limbo.
And hey — that sucks! I understand why Miami felt it had to overpay Tagovailoa, because the alternative was to lose out on a decent quarterback and potentially wind up unable to replace him. But look at what the Broncos just did: The team acquired Russell Wilson, and it became clear very fast that that was a terrible idea. Denver ate his salary, drafted Bo Nix and is now in a fight for the No. 1 seed in the AFC.
If you trust your front office to identify quarterback talent, then you can get away with what Denver did. Miami could do that as well this offseason — trading for someone like Mac Jones, for example, is a way of adding an affordable quarterback talent who you can maybe win with.
But it would have been even better for the team if it had just never given Tagovailoa a huge deal in the first place. Overpaying for potential works sometimes (see the Jaguars and Trevor Lawrence this season), but it fails much more often. In addition to Tagovailoa and Murray, Deshaun Watson and Kirk Cousins both make over $40 million while Geno Smith is at $37.5 million.
There has to come a point where teams recognize that they can't win a Super Bowl with those guys. Paying someone like Tagovailoa over $50 million is a guarantee that you're going to be fired as a general manager. Letting him walk and trying to build around a rookie isn't fun either, but Miami could have just had a lost 2024 and then drafted Jaxson Dart in 2025, something that could have put the team in a much better spot going forward.
Now, if every team tried this, the whole concept would fall apart, but not every team needs to try it. If you have a top-10 or even top-15 quarterback, you can pay him. If you can find a bargain like Indianapolis did with Daniel Jones, then roll with that. But if your quarterback is something like the 20th-best starter in the league, just don't give him $40 or $50 million dollars!