Tua Tagovailoa gave the Miami Dolphins a scare Monday night when his tackle of a Los Angeles Rams linebacker resulted in him taking a knee to the head. The quarterback doesn’t regret the decision, though.
“I wouldn’t do anything differently,” Tagovailoa told reporters Wednesday. “I’ll make the tackle, that’s what I’ve got to do. It is what it is. It’s hard to score in this league.”
The only part Tagovailoa regrets is that he put himself in a position where he needed to make a tackle at all.
“I wasn’t just going to jump out of the way for him to just run down the sideline and potentially score,” Tagovailoa said. “So you’ve got to make decisions and I should have never threw the pick in the first place so that’s it.”
Tua took a knee to his head when going in for a tackle after his INTpic.twitter.com/VNcaAKDYaK
— The 33rd Team (@The33rdTeamFB) November 12, 2024
Tagovailoa, 26, missed four games earlier this season after suffering a concussion — his third since 2022. After his October return, the quarterback dismissed the idea of retirement or additional safety precautions like a Guardian cap.
Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel doesn’t believe that the quarterback is being careless, though.
“He does not take it lightly, I know that,” McDaniel said. “In football, I think there’s some times where you can picture something in your mind and then you evaluate it on film, ‘Wow, I left myself vulnerable.’ So I don’t think he was disregarding his body in a stubborn manner, I think he had a situation occur where he thought he was protecting himself.”
In the four games without Tagovailoa in the lineup, the Dolphins went 1-3 and averaged 10 points per game. In five games with the starter, the team is 2-3 and averaging 21.4 points.
