NFL MVP Betting: Will Tua Tagovailoa's Ascent Continue?

“Is Tua Tagovailoa even good?”

This was a legitimate question heading into the 2022 NFL Season. Now, the fourth-year passer enters the 2023 season tied with the seventh-best odds (+1600) on the NFL season awards betting odds market to take home the AP NFL MVP award.

How Exactly Did We Get Here?

The Miami Dolphins made Tagovailoa the sixth overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft. The Crimson Tide legend helped Alabama win the national title as a rookie before leading them on multiple top-notch campaigns and declaring for the NFL.

But, even entering the league, the productive quarterback’s injury history was the subject of some concern. Tagovailoa had multiple ankle injuries that required surgery while at Alabama, and had his collegiate career cut short by a devastating hip injury in 2019 – reportedly the same injury that ended Bo Jackson’s career in the early 1990’s.

Concerns about his ability to return to his pre-injury form were not dispelled when the team decided to give journeyman quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick the starting job heading into Tagovailoa’s rookie season. His tepid performances throughout that season did little to instill confidence, either, with head coach Brian Flores benching the rookie in favor of Fitzpatrick multiple times.

Tagovailoa showed signs of improvement in his second season but still missed multiple games due to injuries. He had just one game with more than 300 passing yards in 2021 as well as a single outing with more than two touchdown passes. The Dolphins seemed hesitant to put too much on his shoulders.

These concerns were all exacerbated by team owner Stephen Ross’ seemingly desperate attempts to replace Tagovailoa as their starter. The Dolphins were reportedly one of the strongest pursuers of former Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson even as he stood accused of sexual harassment by over 20 women. The league also eventually suspended Ross and forced the team to forfeit their 2023 first-round draft pick after they discovered Ross had violated the NFL’s tampering policy in his efforts to recruit quarterback Tom Brady (and coach Sean Payton) to play for the team.

Tagovailoa’s first two seasons were something of an enigma, leaving fans and viewers to wonder if his hip injury had cost him an NFL-level throwing arm, if his success at Alabama was due to his elite supporting cast, or if he was simply too injury-prone to last in the NFL. He answered some of those questions in 2022.

MVP-Level Tua

Anyone reading this article will likely remember the end to Tagovailoa’s 2022 campaign; we’ll come back to that a little later on. But for much of his third season, Tagovailoa was playing like one of the best quarterbacks in the league.

Comparing his numbers to the rest of the league, Tagovailoa’s 8.37 net adjusted yards per attempt, which factors touchdowns, sacks, and interceptions into a player’s traditional yards per attempt rate, ranked first in the entire league. His 8.37 mark was almost half a yard more than eventual MVP-winner Patrick Mahomes (7.93) and was over a full yard more than Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts (7.31)

Tua was throwing touchdowns at the same rate as Mahomes (6.3%) while throwing interceptions at an impressively low 2.0% rate. He wasn’t just gaming the system like we’ve seen San Francisco 49ers quarterbacks do in recent years with low-air-yard, high-yards-after-catch-style passing; Tagovailoa was airing it out in 2022. His average intended air yards per attempt of 9.6 ranked third in the league among qualifying passers and first among guys who kept their jobs. Marcus Mariota (10.2) and Mitchell Trubisky (9.7) were each benched for rookie quarterbacks last season.

In the first two weeks of the 2022 season, Tagovailoa threw for an insane total of 739 passing yards with 7 touchdowns and just 2 interceptions. He was turning the Dolphins into a fireworks show. But unfortunately, that’s when things started to take a turn for the worse.

Career-Threatening Concussions

In Week 3 against the Buffalo Bills, Tagovailoa took a late shot from Bills linebacker Matt Milano. He was slow to get up after the hit and stumbled as he rose to his feet. To viewers, it seemed as though the third-year signal caller had suffered a concussion, but the team’s medical staff cleared him to return to the field, believing that Tagovailoa only suffered a back injury.

Tagovailoa was cleared to start in Week 4 to take on the Bengals as well, but that’s where things became scary. In what was slated to be an epic duel between Tagovailoa and collegiate rival Joe Burrow, Tagovailoa suffered what was probably his second concussion in under a week. The quarterback lost consciousness on the field while displaying a fencing response to his head injury and had to be carted from the field so he could receive immediate medical attention. It was a truly terrifying scene and one that provoked concerns about his ability to ever play football again.

He did eventually return to the team after taking the following two weeks to recover, and he started in the team’s next nine games before suffering another concussion. He was unable to return for the remainder of the season or for the Dolphins’ Wild Card game.

After the season ended, Tagovailoa candidly told reporters that he had considered retiring from the NFL after his terrifying experiences in 2022. General manager Chris Grier added that concerns about Tagovailoa’s health led to the team “consider all options” about the future of their quarterback position. But as the 2023 NFL Draft came and went, it seems like both Tagovailoa and the Dolphins are committed to him starting the season in 2023.

Running it Back in 2023

The key components that led to Tagovailoa’s breakout in 2022 should all be returning for the upcoming season. Wide receivers Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle will be back in the forefront, and the team added explosive Texas A&M running back Devon Achane in the third round of the 2023 NFL Draft to hopefully provide a more consistent ground game in the upcoming season.

The tandem of Waddle and Hill is one of the most explosive and most productive pairings in the entire league. Even with Tagovailoa out of the lineup, Hill finished the season with 119 catches for 1,710 yards and 7 touchdowns. Only Justin Jefferson had more receptions and yards than Hill in 2022, but Waddle wasn’t very far behind, either; his 1,356 yards ranked seventh in the NFL last season.

As long as that duo – and their quarterback – stays healthy, we should be in for another extremely efficient aerial attack from Miami this season.

Critics of Tagovailoa have been quick to point out his elite supporting cast, crediting Hill and Waddle for his third-season breakout. But apart from one crazy game against the Minnesota Vikings’ terrible passing defense, neither of those receivers met expectations without Tagovailoa in the lineup.

Neither Hill nor Waddle scored a receiving touchdown in any of the four games Tagovailoa missed last season, and outside of the aforementioned game against the Vikings, neither receiver eclipsed 55 receiving yards in any of those games, either. Having elite weapons can make a huge difference for any quarterback, but we can’t attribute all of Tagovailoa’s success to his receivers when the other quarterbacks on the team were completely unable to replicate his success with those players.

The Brutal AFC East

Tom Brady leaving the New England Patriots left a bit of a power vacuum in the AFC East. Brady and the Patriots won the division in all but 2 of his 19 seasons there, and in one of those, he was injured.

The Buffalo Bills were quick to take up the mantle as the division champs after Brady’s departure, but the AFC East title will be hotly contested during the 2023 season. The Bills have won the division in each of the past three seasons, but none of the four teams there can truly be ruled out for the upcoming season.

The New York Jets added quarterback Aaron Rodgers to an elite defense that already nearly earned them a playoff berth a season ago. The Dolphins were able to squeeze their way into the playoffs last season despite their injured quarterbacks and nearly toppled the Bills in the Wild Card round with rookie Skylar Thompson under center. Even the Patriots, whose 2022 season was a disaster by their franchise’s lofty standards, could have a bounce-back season in 2023 with an actual offensive coordinator as their offensive coordinator.

MVP winners in recent history have more or less been required to guide their teams to division titles, and virtually all of them need to win at least 11 or even 12 games to make legitimate cases for themselves.

Betting markets seem to think that’s within reach for the Dolphins this season. NFL win total betting odds have set the Dolphins’ win total at 9.5 wins, with even odds on both sides of the line.

They’ll have arguably one of the toughest roads to a division title of any team in the league; many early strength-of-schedule models project the Dolphins and their AFC East counterparts for the most difficult schedules in the upcoming season. However, emerging victorious from the maelstrom that is the AFC East would be a significant feather in Tagovailoa’s cap for an MVP bid.

MVP Narratives

It would be nice to say with certainty that every MVP winner has been held to the same standards each and every year. For the most part, winners have had to reach specific thresholds to qualify – such as the aforementioned division titles and a minimum number of wins. In Tagovailoa’s case, he will almost certainly need to prove that he can play for an entire season.

But, Tagovailoa could get a bit of a narrative bump in AP voters’ eyes due to his own comeback narrative. 2012 winner Adrian Peterson’s MVP case certainly benefited from his against-all-odds comeback from the knee injury that ended his previous season and jeopardized his career.

That’s not to discount what Tagovailoa was doing on the field when he was healthy in 2022; he was truly elite and MVP-worthy. But, coming back from his terrifying injuries and putting up exciting numbers again might sway additional votes in his favor.

There’s also the Dolphins’ in-division doldrums. The ‘Phins have won the AFC East just twice since the turn of the century. One of those division wins came in the year 2000, and the other occurred in 2011 after Brady suffered a season-ending knee injury in the first week of the year. Even then, they took the title on a tie-breaker while sharing an 11-5 record with the Pats.

Winning the AFC East for his franchise for the first time in over a decade would provide a massive narrative boost to Tagovailoa’s MVP campaign.

Tua Tagovailoa's 2023 Outlook

Tagovailoa’s seventh-ranked, +1600 odds to win the AP NFL MVP award in 2023 might seem steep, but the Alabama product was on a truly elite trajectory before injuries cut his 2022 season short.

With his full cast of supporting characters returning this year, he’ll be well set up to forge his MVP case in the fires of the fiercely competitive AFC East. The Dolphins have been surging in recent years, and by putting them on top of the division via his prolific passing would give Tagovailoa a legitimate shot at becoming the MVP in 2023.

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