Examining the Wild ESPN Tua Suggestion

We're now less than a week away from the NFL Trade Deadline, and the rumors, hypothetical deals and even suggestions are still flying all over the place.

And ESPN writer Seth Walder offered up a doozy Tuesday, one that involved Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.

In a comprehensive trade deadline overview piece, ESPN has different writers offered up suggestions for a player each team might target, and Walder's choice for the Las Vegas Raiders was, yes, Tua Tagovailoa.

"Hear me out," Walder wrote. "This is the Brock Osweiler trade on steroids. The Raiders currently have $103 million and $174 million in 2026 and 2027 cap space, respectively. What I would propose here is the Dolphins send a 2026 second-round pick and 2027 second-round pick along with Tagovailoa in exchange for a 2027 fifth-round pick. If that trade happened next week, Las Vegas would keep Tagovailoa through 2026 at a cost of roughly $70 million over that time, the vast majority fully guaranteed. It would get the Dolphins out of their tight cap situation so they can reset and rebuild, and it would be a more efficient use of resources for Las Vegas -- regardless of whether Tagovailoa ever takes the field for them or not."

WHAT TO MAKE OF THIS IDEA

For those not familiar with the trade involving Brock Osweiler, which came before he finished out his NFL career with one season with the Dolphins, the Houston Texans sent him to the Cleveland Browns to get his salary off their books and gave the Browns a second-round pick and a sixth-round pick to do so, getting a fourth-rounder in return.

The idea here, as explained by Walder, would be the same for the Dolphins, eliminating most of the Dolphins' cap commitment to Tagovailoa.

But it's still a pretty wild idea from this vantage point for a couple of reason.

First, we have to remember this trade was proposed from the vantage point of the Raiders, with the Dolphins going along for salary-cap purposes.

While the principle is the same as the Osweiler move, we're talking about two different quarterbacks here because the Dolphins already have proven they can win with Tagovailoa, who's unquestionably better than Osweiler.

While he had a really bad outing against the Cleveland Browns, Tagovailoa rebounded against the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday to deliver the kind of highly efficient performance he delivered on a pretty consistent basis in 2022 and particularly in 2023.

Whether that kind of quarterbacking is good enough to get the Dolphins deep into the playoffs can be debated, but the fact is that Miami did make the playoffs twice with Tagovailoa as their starting quarterback.

The $54 million cap number for 2026 is problematic, no doubt, but the idea of surrendering prime draft capital to remove it from the books is pretty tough to digest if the Dolphins do decide to start over in 2026, which moving on from Tua would suggest.

While some sort of change remains the expectation barring a dramatic turnaround in the second half of the 2025 season, Mike McDaniel remains the head coach and is fighting to keep his job. And it's not like he's going to sign off on moving his starting quarterback while he's trying to win games.

This is the part, though, where we point out that this idea actually was brought up a couple of weeks ago by an anonymous NFL executive in a story in The Athletic.

For the Dolphins to even consider doing something like this would represent quite a dramatic shift in their handling of Tagovailoa after they made a commitment to him with his contract extension of July 2024.

In the final analysis, it's really difficult to envision that kind of trade being consummated not only because the Dolphins have shown they can win with Tua, but more so because giving up good draft capital to get rid of him doesn't help a rebuilding franchise.

One thing for sure, it does make for an interesting conversation, though.

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