MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — It’s our belief that halftime adjustments are largely overblown, but there are exceptions to every rule.
Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium was one of them. The Miami Dolphins flipped a switch at the break that turned a 10-point halftime deficit into a 20-17 victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars.
And it probably wouldn’t have happened had quarterback Tua Tagovailoa not gotten all up in his teammates’ backsides after a sloppy first half.
Miami Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa Takes Over
“Tua, he stepped up in the second half,” Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill said. “He did his thing. Second half, he played lights out. Like I said, the first half, the offense, we all were kind of timid a little bit, shaking all the dust off our knees and stuff like that. We were getting out of the huddle kind of slow.”
“The thing that really motivated me the most was when we come in, during halftime, and this is like the first time I heard Tua’s Hawaiian accent,” Hill continued. “It’s crazy. Like, he was turned up and animated in the locker room. I’m like, ‘OK, I’m liking this.’
“He was going, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, let’s go, man.’ He called me out. J.W. (Jaylen Waddle), T-Stead (Terron Armstead). I’m like, I’m loving this, bro. Me, I love accountability at its finest because that’s what I grew up on. I grew up on my dad telling me, ‘Reek, I need you to be better.’ Not patting me on my back, not doing this.
“For my quarterback to call me out in front of the whole offense like that, I had to step up. I had to do my thing. I like that in a leader.”
Tagovailoa also led by example. He completed 12 of 16 passes for 207 yards and a touchdown in the second half to eclipse the 300-yard mark for the 13th time in 52 career starts.
The biggest play? His 80-yard bomb to Hill that closed the gap to just three points late in the third quarter.
“I was writing down plays on the whiteboard at the time. It was a cool moment because it was genuine, and it was not anything but constructive,” McDaniel said of Tua’s halftime speech. “There were details that lead to execution in terms of how we are organized and communicate with who’s in the huddle, how those players go from the huddle to the line of scrimmage and just executing the nuances of our job that I guess at the time he definitely felt that there were several guys that were loose there.
“I couldn’t deny that at all and was really pumped to hear him constructively lead. It wasn’t, ‘Let’s win’ or ‘Let’s make plays.’ It was, ‘Let’s adhere to our standard,’ which is what a captain and a franchise quarterback have to be that voice to echo. So it was cool to have him beat me to the punch of something. If he wouldn’t have said it, I probably would have very closely, holding all of us accountable. And I think it was a cool opportunity for him in his growth and what this team definitely needs, and he knew it.”