BY ADAM H. BEASLEY
abeasley@MiamiHerald.comThere will come a time — perhaps in a month, perhaps in a year — when people stop grading Ryan Tannehill on a curve.
Rookie quarterbacks are, by and large, cut considerable slack. The position is so demanding and pitfalls are everywhere.
That’s why talent evaluators usually give quarterbacks a full 16 starts before making any hard and fast judgments on their long-term viability.
So in Year 1, week-to-week improvement and the long-term trend lines are just as important — if not more so — than raw stats.
The problem for Tannehill is that he appears to be regressing at the very time he should be figuring it out. And his get-out-of-jail-free card — his rookie status — has a shelf life of just a few more weeks.
After playing mistake-free football for most of October, Tannehill has had a rough November. And as he has gone, so have the Dolphins.
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Despite all of that, Daniel Jeremiah, a former scout and current analyst on NFL Network, said Friday it is still too early to sound any alarms on Tannehill’s future.
Tannehill doesn’t have enough talent around him to make a fair assessment, Jeremiah argues.
“They can’t stretch the field at all vertically with what they have on the outside,” Jeremiah said. “The field has completely shrunk on him. While other quarterbacks are playing full-court basketball, he’s playing half-court.”
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