I wrote yesterday that I was “startled” by the way in which Mike McDaniel presents and found it “odd.” I wrote that on the substance he was, to me, “brilliant”. This however cannot be chalked up to odd style. McDaniel mishandles the substance of the Tua Tagovailoa injury bombshell, which he drops in his monotone as an "In other injury news" afterthought sandwiched in between updates on three other players. The first question. Just watch the first 41 secs below. This is not normal. Very strange.
McDaniel know exactly what he has just done here. As he began his answer on the injury report he doesn't look up from :09 to :27, 18 seconds. He then looks up very briefly, 2 secs, and then per his style looks down again for 12 more secs until he looks up again--and directly at the questioner for two more secs as he drops the Tua bombshell.
That was deliberate emphasis by McDaniel. He speaks faster revealing Tagovailoa's injury--"And we also placed Tua intheconcussionprotocol."--than he did discussing the injuries to the first two players.
This is the most important sports news story on ESPN. Tagovailoa plays the most important position on the football field and he is, it's not even close, the single most important single player to this franchise. I don't care if some other guy had his leg amputated, you lead with Tua.
There is another concern. McDaniel didn't know about Tagovailoa until "a couple hours ago. Not during the game. He was asked about two separate instances where the team spotters in the booth missed things: the one that the pencils focus on most is a replay challenge to a call on the field. The other is any hit on Tua that would have caused the concussion. This is McDaniel's response on Tua:
"As far as the game was concerned, no one recognized anything with regard to any sort of hit. I can't really tell you exactly what it was."
"What kind of people are we?, to borrow from McDaniel on Sunday, that "Dolphins" people, professionals presumably, spotters, one set of whom, it is my understanding, are tasked specifically to look for plays that cause injuries, particularly concussions to Tagovailoa, missed during the game and all of Sunday a play that was identified as the likely cause as it happened in real time by an apparent rank amateur and posted at 4:56 p.m. yesterday. Listen to Michael Williams reaction at :08 of his :18 sec video of the play that he snipped: "Ooh". Mr. Williams knew immediately that that was a concussion hit. How did the "Dolphins'" professionals not see that? It calls to mind powerfully McDaniels' statement that Tagovailoa was not concussed in the Buffalo game less than a week before he suffered the horrific sack that resulted in the "fencing" position of his hands. Are the "Dolphins" professional spotters not looking? Are they looking but not seeing? Or did they see and not report? The NFLPA filed suit against the NFL and the "Dolphins" over their handling of Tua's concussion in the Cincinnati game and his apparent concussion against Buffalo. I don't trust the Miami "Dolphins" as an organization and at this point I don't trust the information, or lack, we are being given by Mike McDaniel.
