Good morning, I’m Tyler Lauletta, subbing in for your usual host, Dan Gartland, who is busy making a list and checking it twice. What is he up to? I don’t trust it… If you like today’s edition of SI:AM, check out our other morning newsletter, SI:CYMI, a rundown of everything happening in the sports world courtesy of our Breaking and Trending News Team. We have a lot of fun over there!
On to the show.
In today’s SI:AM:
🐬 Tua rides the pine
🐻 Bears’ latest stadium threat
🐅 Tiger’s 50 biggest moments
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After all that, the Dolphins are swimming with the fishes
If you didn’t watch Monday Night Football, you might not have noticed the unofficial end to the Dolphins’ season. Miami played with no urgency while down 25 in the fourth quarter, and whatever momentum they had built from winning five of their six previous games vanished. It was an odd showing for a team that had plenty of them this season.
After parting ways with their general manager in October, the Dolphins are making another change: quarterback Tua Tagovailoa is officially heading to the bench, with seventh-round rookie Quinn Ewers set to start on Sunday against the Bengals. He will be backed up by Zach Wilson, with Tua serving as the emergency third QB.
Benching Tagovailoa is far from an easy move. He just signed a massive contract extension in 2024, and the Dolphins will have a hard time wiggling out of his deal. He carries a dead cap hit of $99.2 million in 2026 if Miami were to cut him before June 1—more than the Broncos took on when they cut Russell Wilson in 2024—or $67.4 million if he was designated as a post-June 1 release, according to Over The Cap. Tagovailoa’s trade market appears slim, too.
But benching Tagovailoa at this point feels like a necessity. With the Dolphins now officially eliminated, they can at least see what they have in Ewers over the final few weeks.
As for what it all means for 2026, we won’t know for a while. The Dolphins may look to wash their hands of Tagovailoa, however expensive he might be, or they might decide that they can use him as a bridge quarterback and try to rebuild from the ground up in 2027. He could also turn his career around. Stranger things have happened, as evidenced by the recent revivals of Sam Darnold and Daniel Jones.
Zooming out, Tagovailoa’s struggles may also be a turning point when it comes to how teams decide to pay quarterbacks. While some raised eyebrows at Tagovailoa’s extension, paying top dollar for a quarterback who had shown better-than-average ability was the norm. (Derek Carr had signed a deal that made him the highest-paid quarterback on an annual basis in 2017; Jimmy Garoppolo one-upped him the following year. The trend of spending on middle-tier quarterbacks continued with Jones’s four-year, $160 million contract in 2023.) The idea of “overpaying” at the position just wasn’t as big a concern as having a black hole under center. Those days might be coming to an end, as starting-caliber quarterbacks have been found for cheaper than $50 million per season.
Finding those players is no easy task, but there is at least proof of concept. Darnold and Baker Mayfield have turned themselves from journeymen into full-fledged starters. Jones found new life in Indianapolis. A team could roll the dice in free agency on Marcus Mariota, who has played well at points filling in for Jayden Daniels, or even contemplate bringing in Kirk Cousins.
The quarterback market will never be reasonable, but the ways in which it’s unreasonable can change drastically. Whether Tua’s deal was a blip on the radar or a turning point in QB economics remains to be seen.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- Today’s Digital Cover is Mitch Goldich’s story on how Oklahoma City came to host multiple medal events for the upcoming 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. I believe it’s the first story in Sports Illustrated history in which a reporter goes whitewater rafting with a sitting mayor.
- Conor Orr breaks down more of what went wrong with Tua’s time in Miami, and some of the mistakes the Dolphins made along the way to get us to this point.
- There’s plenty of talk about Tua and the Dolphins in Albert Breer’s latest mailbag.
- Orr and Gilbert Manzano have the inside scoop on the Bears’ stadium plans, which may include a move to Indiana.
- Manzano identifies six coaching situations to watch with three weeks to go in the NFL season.
- Greg Bishop examines how the Rams have remodeled their team on the fly with a little help from football biology.
- Pat Forde shows that the “unprecedented” challenge facing Ole Miss football does have a little bit of precedence, albeit in college basketball.
- SI Golf is counting down the 50 biggest moments of Tiger Woods’s life and career ahead of his 50th birthday on Dec. 30. Check out Part 1 of the team’s list here and Part 2 here.
- Blake Silverman and Liam McKeone list six NBA players who deserve to be All-Stars this season for the first time in their careers.
The top five…
…things I saw last night:
5. Guess how many pullups Lane Johnson can do—it’s more than whatever you would have guessed.
4. Formula One and the FIA revealed some massive changes coming to cars in 2026. It’s going to be one incredible season.
3. Kirk Cousins takes us all to football school. All those athlete podcasts, and we can’t get more of this anywhere? Some network needs to give Cousins a megadeal as soon as he hangs ‘em up for good.
2. David Covucci of FOIAball broke down just how much college football teams are spending on balloons. Again, it’s more than whatever you would have guessed.
1. Kyrie Irving gave this robot exactly what it deserved.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Benching Tua Tagovailoa Puts Dolphins in a Tricky Spot.