Who is better, Tua Tagovailoa or Justin Herbert?
Having been selected back-to-back in the 2020 draft at fifth and sixth overall, respectively, Tua Tagovailoa and Justin Herbert were all but destined to see their NFL narratives intertwined.
Going back even further, though, the two strands of their quarterbacking careers have repeatedly crossed each other in noteworthy ways. At various points along the path to Sunday night’s showdown between Tagovailoa’s visiting Miami Dolphins and Herbert’s Los Angeles Chargers, each moved into what appeared at the time to be the more ascendant position, only to lose ground to the other.
At the moment, notwithstanding a relatively underwhelming performance last week in which he suffered a minor ankle injury, Tagovailoa can lay claim to the upper hand in a season that has seen him generate some MVP buzz. That represents a dramatic turnabout from the past two seasons, which saw Herbert burst into the league and cause Dolphins fans and others to wonder whether Miami had made a mistake by choosing Tagovailoa at No. 5, leaving the Oregon star to fall to the Chargers.
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“I feel that I’ve been very blessed to have gotten chosen, regardless of if I got chosen before him or after him,” Tagovailoa said this week of how the chips fell for him and Herbert in the 2020 draft. “I’m just happy to be where I’m at. I don’t think anything of it. I know everyone else outside of our building and fans want to make speculations about that, but for me, I’m just very fortunate, very blessed to be in this position. I’ll let everyone else handle the talking with that.”
During the 2020 and 2021 seasons, Herbert was much more the talk of the league. He set NFL records for first-year quarterbacks with 31 passing touchdowns, 36 total touchdowns, 396 completions, eight games with 300-plus passing yards and six games with three or more touchdowns. Herbert earned the Associated Press offensive rookie of the year award, then followed that by throwing 38 touchdown passes last season and becoming the youngest NFL quarterback to top 5,000 yards in a single campaign.
Meanwhile, Tagovailoa’s NFL debut was delayed while he recovered from a severe hip injury suffered during his final season at Alabama in 2019. When he did finally take the field, Tagovailoa produced fairly modest numbers through last season: 27 touchdown passes and 15 interceptions in 23 games, with an average of 194.2 passing yards per game and an 88.8 passer rating. Herbert’s numbers over the same span in the latter two categories were 292.2 and 97.9.
Asked in March whether Tagovailoa could become an elite quarterback, Dolphins General Manager Chris Grier — who made the fateful draft-day decision — offered a decidedly lukewarm response.
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“I can’t say he can’t be,” Grier said.
It also couldn’t have helped Tagovailoa’s confidence that the Dolphins were reported to have been pursuing prominent veteran quarterbacks Tom Brady and Deshaun Watson. However, the team eventually gave its young signal-caller a boost this spring by hiring Coach Mike McDaniel and trading for wide receiver Tyreek Hill.
With McDaniel proving his reputation was well-deserved as one of the NFL’s brightest young offensive minds, and Hill forming a notably dangerous tandem with fellow wide receiver Jaylen Waddle, Tagovailoa has blossomed in his third season. The 24-year-old leads the NFL in passer rating (112.0), yards per attempt (9.0), yards per completion (13.2) and passing touchdown rate (6.6). Tagovailoa also enters Week 14 with Pro Football Focus’s highest passing grade (90.4), and Football Outsiders has him second only to the Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes in defense-adjusted yards above replacement (DYAR), its primary metric for quarterbacks.
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Herbert, also 24, is 20th in DYAR and 15th in PFF’s passing grades this season, and he is 14th in passer rating (92.3). He is holding his own in passing yards per game, ranking fifth with 278.3, but the numbers of greatest concern to him might be six and six — which represents the Chargers’ wins and losses — leaving the .500 team on the outside of the playoff picture for the moment. At 8-4, the Dolphins are very much in postseason contention, thanks to Tagovailoa’s dissections of opposing defenses.
“I think they’ve really crafted an offense that plays to his strengths as a player, and I think you’re seeing that, just him playing with confidence, good decision-making and getting the ball to his playmakers,” Chargers Coach Brandon Staley said Wednesday of Tagovailoa. “It’s been consistent throughout the season.”
For his part, Tagovailoa had words of praise this week for his Los Angeles counterpart, calling Herbert “a great player.”
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“I mean, you can’t say anything bad about this guy …” Tagovailoa said. “He can run, he can throw, he can throw on the run — he can do a lot of things, and it’s pretty remarkable. So I have nothing but respect for him and his game, too.”
Tagovailoa acknowledged that his appreciation for Herbert came mostly from afar. Herbert, when asked this week about the quarterback with whom he is so frequently compared, made the same point, noting that the year they went through the draft process marked the worldwide outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
“A lot of it was separated, so we weren’t able to work out together and things like that,” Herbert said. “For the most part, it was just checking in when we were at the scouting combine and things like that.”
At that time, record-setting LSU quarterback Joe Burrow had leapfrogged both Tagovailoa and Herbert to become the expected No. 1 pick. Tagovailoa’s hip injury, following some ankle issues at Alabama, raised questions about whether his relatively small stature (6 feet, 217 pounds) portended a short stay in the NFL. That seemed to open the door for the 6-6, 236-pound Herbert to possibly be the second quarterback drafted, particularly because he had proven admirably sturdy as a junior and senior.
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“I have him above Tua,” legendary personnel executive Gil Brandt said of Herbert in the run-up to the 2020 draft. “ … Will Tua be there playing for this year? Yeah. Will he be there in 2023 or 2024? You don’t know, because of all the injuries. In other words, what’s his shelf life? The doctors keep sending these good reports out on him, but nobody says how long his shelf life will be.”
Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa asked about the constant comparisons to Chargers QB Justin Herbert and how draft worked out. Says he’s happy where he is. He knows the fan and media chatter.
“I’ll let everyone else handle the talking with that.”
(🎥 @MiamiDolphins) pic.twitter.com/vskn575uBx
— Will Manso (@WillManso) December 7, 2022Herbert’s sophomore season at Oregon had been interrupted by a broken collarbone, but it began with a bang. In less than 18 quarters before he got hurt, Herbert threw for 1,264 yards and accounted for 12 total touchdowns, with just two interceptions, and looked like a future NFL star. For his part, Tagovailoa spent most of that 2017 season as a rarely used freshman backup to Crimson Tide quarterback Jalen Hurts. Herbert returned after a few weeks to finish off the Ducks’ final three games with good numbers, but no one capped the 2017 season in more impressive fashion than Tagovailoa, who came off the bench to spell an ineffective Hurts in the College Football Playoff championship game and lead Alabama past Georgia.
That performance served as a springboard to a 2018 campaign in which Tagovailoa won the starting job from Hurts and went on to complete 69 percent of his passes for 3,966 yards, 43 touchdowns and just six interceptions. Herbert performed well in 2018 in his own right, but he wasn’t as efficiently impressive as the previous year, and while Tagovailoa finished a well-supported second in the 2018 Heisman Trophy race to Oklahoma’s Kyler Murray, Herbert was left out of the voting entirely.
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It wasn’t the first time Herbert had reason to feel overlooked. Despite possessing terrific size, athleticism and passing talent on his Eugene, Ore., high school team, he was rated a three-star recruit. Apart from the hometown Ducks, his college offers came from programs such as Northern Arizona, Montana State and Portland State.
One year behind Herbert while in high school in Honolulu, Tagovailoa was a five-star recruit who eventually chose powerhouse Alabama over offers from a slew of name-brand programs including LSU, Texas A&M, USC, UCLA, Mississippi and Nebraska. Oregon also offered Tagovailoa, despite already having Herbert in the fold.
Then came college, when Herbert took an early lead in production while Tagovailoa waited for an opportunity that he took full advantage of until his untimely injury. Even with the hip problem, Tagovailoa maintained an edge over Herbert in consensus mock drafts before the real thing unfolded in April 2020 and Miami opted for the quarterback prospect who reached greater heights in college.
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“He fit a lot of the criteria that we talk about at the quarterback position. Good player, good person, leadership qualities,” then-Dolphins coach Brian Flores said at the time. “We’re very happy with this pick.”
Doubts about the more reserved Herbert’s leadership skills were among his primary knocks going into the draft, but Miami’s decision looked potentially disastrous heading into this season. Tagovailoa helped the Dolphins get a November 2020 win over Herbert’s Chargers in a rookie showdown, but in November 2021, when Grier was asked whether he had made the wrong choice between the two, he replied: “I don’t know. I’ll leave that for you to decide.”
Since then, Tagovailoa has gone into a gallop in their unofficial horse race, and it’s fair to suggest he is riding a bit higher than Herbert these days.
As soon as Sunday night, though, if history is any indication, that dynamic could start to change again.
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