Tua Tagovailoa is learning how to fall this off season

Tua Tagovailoa is back on the field this week, spinning the football with the rest of his Miami Dolphins teammates. But he may not get to show them what he learned this offseason.

By design, no Dolphins defender will get anywhere near Tua during phase three of OTAs. A coach will whistle the play dead because there’s to be no contract. But the main thing the Dolphins quarterback did this offseason was to learn how to fall in a graceful, yet scientific way so that he can avoid concussions this fall.

He even started learning Jiu jitsu. Miami coach Mike McDaniel said Tua Tagovailoa is “controlling the controllable.”

It’s “something that I would epitomize his offseason with,” McDaniel said of his quarterback. “You want to talk about going above and beyond — training, martial arts — so much so that he knew the training before he knew what it was called. I think he was calling it judo. Jiu jitsu is what he was doing. But that in terms of helping him progress in his career has been phenomenal. The work that he’s done this offseason, it was so obviously beneficial that we’ve incorporated it into some of our drill work that we’ll do with the quarterbacks.”

Tua Tagovailoa suffered at least 2 concussions last fall

Tua Tagovailoa suffered at least two, possibly three, concussions last season. The worst unfolded on Thursday Night Football in Cincinnati when he needed to be transported to a local hospital. He may have suffered a concussion days before in Miami. Then on Christmas Day against Green Bay, he sustained another head injury. Doctors didn’t diagnose him with a concussion until the symptoms showed up after the game. He missed the rest of the season, including the Dolphins playoff game. Speculation about whether he should continue playing was one of the biggest NFL sub plots of the early off season.

As McDaniel pointed out, the only time quarterbacks ever are hit is in a game. So there’s no practicing on how to take a blow in such a way that it won’t injure you. There are certain ways to fall that will absorb the energy. McDaniel said Tua is studying game film and focusing on the hits.

“It’s a lot of strategic falling that is patterned after things that happened to our quarterbacks during the season,” McDaniel told reporters. “So kind of recreating those things, because the master of jiu jitsu had to study some game tape to understand how he was falling, where the impact points were and what we could do to help correct it.

“By and large, you find out that core strength is very much important when you’re talking about the transfer of energy of the human body going to the ground,” the coach said. “And different things that you can do to minimize that are strategic. But then strengthening of the core so that when you’re going to the ground, the top of your torso isn’t just a leverage whipping device.”