BY ADAM H. BEASLEY
abeasley@MiamiHerald.com

There 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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I almost wish he wasn't so good in October so that people would stop over reacting to TWO poor games. It's almost like we got spoiled.

“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.”

You bring up a good point, when your rookie quarterback posts a QB rating over 90 and doesn't throw an interception for a month, you tend to let your expectations soar. Now that he's bounced back down to earth and teams are figuring our offense out, people are quick to change their minds.



This is a great comparison. Earlier in the year teams were blitzing Tannehill trying to see if he could handle the pressure. Well, the kid posted the best QB rating in the NFL against the blitz and was killing teams downfield with the best passer rating in the NFL on passes of over 20 yards. So what did teams do, they kept their safeties high and shut down Hartline and Bess, not the most difficult thing to do. Now Tannehill's game has been reduced to dink and dunk passes. This Jeremiah guy is right, when Tannehill gets a couple of burners on the outside, his game will take off. When he can stretch the field vertically again, that great deep ball will come back into the equation.

Hopefully we actually GET a speed WR. We had one, Armstrong and cut him.

Tannehill has produced four games with a passer rating over 90 this season and threw for 431 yards against Arizona. But he also has five games below 51, including two straight game in the 40s.

After a strong start, he seems to have hit the wall often encountered by rookie quarterbacks.

Tannehill was an unknown commodity early in the season — in part because he started only 19 games at quarterback at Texas A&M — but opponents now have nine games worth of tape on him (he threw only five passes Oct. 28 at the New York Jets before injuring his left knee).

“Teams now have a read on what Tannehill likes to do, as well as how the Fins have set up their offensive game plan around him,” former Raiders and Browns executive Michael Lombardi wrote Friday on NFL.com.

“After five games the rookie signal-caller’s strengths and weaknesses become crystal clear on the game tape. What types of throws he likes, what part of the field he targets the most, how he reacts to the speed of the game, how he handles pressure and how he performs under pressure.”

Tannehill’s performances in upcoming home games against Seattle and New England could determine if his progress has stalled or he merely has had a couple of rough games.

“Ryan’s fine. It’s just growing pains,” Dolphins running back Reggie Bush said. “We all got to go through them.”

Rookie quarterbacks certainly do.

In Washington, the offense led by Robert Griffin III has stumbled in consecutive losses to Pittsburgh and Carolina. Luck has played exceptionally well in five straight games, but had a couple of clunkers earlier this season against Chicago and the Jets.

The most consistent rookie quarterback this season might be the one who was drafted last – third-round Seattle pick Russell Wilson, who has six passer ratings over 90 and four over 100. The Seahawks (6-4) and Wilson, who has 15 touchdown passes and just eight interceptions, visit Sun Life Stadium next Sunday.

Tannehill who has six touchdown passes, 11 interceptions and a 70.8 passer rating, said he still is moving forward.

“I feel like I’m getting better; I feel like I’m learning a lot,” he said. “Obviously you can’t turn the ball over, and that’s a big problem right now. I realize that throwing five picks in the last two games is a big problem and one that needs to be addressed.”

Tannehill also needs more help from his teammates.

“It’s not all him,” coach Joe Philbin said. “This is a unit-wide issue that we are having right now, and we will address it as such.”

The Dolphins are 5-of-23 on third down the past two games, haven’t rushed for 100 yards in seven games and are minus-7 in turnovers the last two games.

“We’ve got to get the running game going, take some of the pressure off Tannehill,” center Mike Pouncey said.

The Dolphins’ lack of playmakers on offense also could be slowing Tannehill’s development. Davone Bess is a good slot receiver and Brian Hartline has a career-high 790 yards, but the two have combined for just two touchdown catches, and the Dolphins did nothing to replace receiver Brandon Marshall after trading him in March.

“With limitations at wide receiver — most critically, nobody who is able to stretch the field — opponents have played more man-to-man against the Dolphins, taking away the easy throws,” Lombardi said.