Top 5 Quarterbacks in Miami Dolphins History

Yes, Dan Marino is #1 and Bob Griese is #2. But did Tua Tagovailoa crack the Top 5? And who’s your fighter: Ryan Tannehill, Jay Fiedler, Tua or someone else?

1. Dan Marino

Marino retired in 1999 as the all-time career leader in passing yards, roughly 10,000 yards ahead of John Elway, who was in second place at the time. He was the all-time career leader in passing touchdowns, 78 ahead of Fran Tarkenton and 120 ahead of Elway. He even led more fourth-quarter comebacks than Elway, finishing second to Johnny Unitas in a category which was only compiled a few years ago.

At some point during the 2023 season, I stumbled into a Marino was not that great, actually debate on one of the many social networks I frequent. I don’t remember the particulars of the Marino skeptic’s argument – I would target those brain cells with the strongest items available at my local dispensary if I did – but the gist of his point was “folks back then didn’t think much of him” and “I remember watching him play.”

It’s not hard to figure out what contemporary reporters/analysts/experts thought of a player. Pro Football Reference lists All Pro and Pro Bowl rosters, as well as the votes for MVP and other awards. Marino earned nine Pro Bowl berths while playing in the same conference as John Elway, Jim Kelly, Warren Moon and others. He won an MVP award and finished third in the balloting twice. He won Offensive Player of the Year concurrently with his MVP award (the historic 48-touchdown 1984 season) and finished near the top of the balloting a few other times. As you might imagine, the fellow who led the league in passing yards five times and set a touchdown record that lasted 20 years was rather well-regarded.

The social media revisionist historian was probably referring to the years 1988-to-1998, not Marino’s historic early-career run. Marino’s career did indeed have a long afterburn, with a few clunker seasons mixed among many very good ones but no real historic achievements after 1986 or so. The Dolphins defense fell apart in the mid-80s, leaving Marino to heave the ball downfield to the slowly aging Mark Duper and Mark Clayton, with little support from anyone else. Kelly rose to prominence in this era, Moon had his peak run-’n’-shoot seasons, and Marino became more of an A-tier than S-tier starter. But he wasn’t thought of any differently than, say, Aaron Rodgers was by the late-2010s: he was a superstar who could get hot and propel his team into the playoffs at any time, and he often did. 

As for “I remember watching him,” that’s just dandy. I’m 53-years old. I turned 14 during Marino’s MVP season. I remember watching him with my junior high buddies when the Eagles weren’t playing, sometimes around a rabbit-ear television, drinking Big Gulps while tossing Nerf balls around the family room, debating whether to ride our bikes back to 7-Eleven to play a little Gauntlet after halftime. My memories of Marino from that era may not be precisely calibrated to “win a social media argument decades later” standards. Fortunately, I have Pro Football Reference statistics, archives, decades of experience covering the NFL as a career and the expert opinions of colleagues to fall back on; otherwise, I might start mistaking hazy impressions and youthful recollections for wisdom!

I’m strawmanning this anonymous Internet denizen a bit. If he’s closer to 43 than 53 and remembers the Dave Wannstedt Dolphins better than the Don Shula Dolphins, then he also recalls a different conversation around Marino than both older fans like me who thought we were watching a spaceship land in 1984 recall and younger fans who are more reliant on sources like PFR can reconstruct. Thirty years from now, many fans will remember wackadoodle Aaron Rodgers so vividly that the accomplishments of the young/unstoppable/relatively normal Rodgers will look like an aberration. The conversation around Russell Wilson right now is unrecognizable when compared to the Let Russ Cook narrative or the praise we piled upon him (justifiably) during the Super Bowl years. Quarterback careers are long. If all we remember are the long, gradual downsides of so many great careers, some of them won’t look so great.

Your fan experience is yours to cherish, and table-pounding for Jay Fiedler is welcome. But if you find yourself fighting on anything like the Marino wasn’t that great hill, ask yourself if you are shortchanging NFL history a bit, and perhaps robbing yourself of some awe and wonder as well. 

2. Bob Griese

"Didn't have to throw the ball. Didn't need to. Against Minnesota, we were up 17-0 at halftime. Their strength defensively was rushing the passer and we were running the ball like mad against them. Hey, I was calling the plays. If I'm an egomaniac, if I'm interested in being the MVP, I'm going to throw the ball, but I didn't care." – Bob Griese on his Super Bowl passing statistics. (via Dave George of the Palm Beach Post, 2011).

Griese joined the Dolphins as a first-round draft pick for a second-year AFL expansion team in 1967. He was a fine young quarterback in his first three seasons, but the Dolphins were dreadful, and his career appeared to be going in the wrong direction by 1969. In modern terms, Griese would have been in danger of not having his fifth-year option picked up after his third season. Of course, the pro football world was a very different place during the days of the AFL-NFL merger.

Don Shula replaced Dolphins coach George Wilson in 1970. The Dolphins instantly transmogrified from a 3-10-1 AFL team that struggled against weaklings like the Boston Patriots to a 10-4 NFL playoff team. Griese bonded with Shula and meshed with the coach’s run-first philosophy. Griese had been calling own plays since his rookie season; Shula gave him NFL-worthy gameplans to work with. The arrival of Paul Warfield also helped. Warfield can be thought of as the Tyreek Hill of that era: he was such a deep threat that he opened up the rest of the offense, even though he only caught about two passes per week.

Griese only started five games during the 1972 regular season, when the Dolphins went 14-0 and won Super Bowl VII. He broke an ankle very early in an October victory over the Chargers. Veteran backup-to-the-stars Earl Morrall took his place for the regular season and the first two playoff games. Griese returned in the second half of the AFC Championship against the Steelers, replacing an ineffective Morrall and rifling a slant that Warfield turned into a 58-yard sprint to help the Dolphins win 21-17.

Griese went just 8-of-11 for 88 yards, one touchdown and one interception in Super Bowl VII; the Dolphins beat Washington 14-7. 

Griese returned to the Super Bowl in 1973 with a Dolphins team which was statistically superior to the undefeated 1972 team. (Having a healthy Griese for 14 games obviously factored into that statistical superiority.) As noted in the quote above, Griese did not throw very often in Super Bowl VIII: he finished 6-of-7 for 73 yards, handing off 51 times in a 24-7 win over the Vikings.

The ground-and-pound Dolphins of the early-70s broke up quickly due to age (Warfield, linebacker Nick Buoniconti), the rival World Football League (running backs Jim Kiick and Larry Csonka, plus Warfield), substance issues (running back Mercury Morris, most famously) and general attrition. Griese suffered multiple injuries in the mid-70s, including a broken toe and a dislocated throwing finger. He also began experiencing blurred vision and vertigo, which were exacerbated by a 1976 concussion. By the end of the 1976 season, there were rumors that Shula would move on from Griese, with the 49ers as a possible trade suitor. Click here for a fascinating video on what happened.

 

Instead of getting traded, Griese donned his trademark spectacles. “It is still too early to know for sure, but it now appears that the city of Miami will be saved by Bob Griese's four eyes,” – wrote Dan Jenkins in Sports Illustrated in the autumn of 1977. 

"I've always had a weak eye and a strong one," Griese said in that Jenkins article. "Last season I started to notice some double-vision and dizziness. I figured, well, I'd go to contacts. For me, though, contacts weren't the answer because of the prisms. I just had to put on glasses." Griese noted that the glasses had not fogged up yet in several trials, including a rainy afternoon in Buffalo. “Sometimes I had to throw through the bubbles, but I could see."

Orchestrating a revamped, pass-oriented Dolphins offense, Griese led the NFL in passing touchdowns in 1977 and completion rate in 1978. He missed the first half of the 1978 season with a knee injury, then faded quickly in 1979, with Don Strock taking over late in the season. Shula drafted David Woodley in 1980, and Griese and Strock took turns as the middle reliever for the youngster for one year. Griese then retired to the college broadcast booth.

Here’s a fun way to think of Griese: imagine Kyle Shanahan and Brock Purdy were one person, and that person was awesome at clock management. At his peak, Griese led a stacked team that could go undefeated for more than half a season with a backup at the helm, but he was a combination quarterback/coordinator who cannot be judged solely on his passing stats during a defense-dominated era. Purdy hasn’t quite led the 49ers to a championship the way Griese led the Dolphins yet. Then again, Griese was running for his life when he was Purdy’s age. 

3. Ryan Tannehill

Tannehill came to the Dolphins as a toolsy-but-raw first-round pick who had played wide receiver early in his Texas A&M career. He had an encouraging rookie season, improved slightly in his second season, then repeated that second season four more times across five years, never developing into anything more than an adequate starter but never falling apart, even after missing all of 2017 with an ACL tear.

Jeff Ireland was the Dolphins general manager at the start of Tannehill’s career. Ireland is most famous for asking Dez Bryant if his mother was a prostitute during a 2010 pre-draft visit, but he was an awful executive in many other ways. Ireland tried and failed to hire Jim Harbaugh and Jeff Fisher before settling for Joe Philbin. He courted Peyton Manning but could not seal the deal before drafting Tannehill.

Ireland traded Brandon Marshall away weeks before drafting Tannehill, leaving the rookie quarterback with a receiving corps headlined by Brian Hartline. In order to fill the void left by Marshall, Ireland signed speedy Mike Wallace away from the Steelers for five years and $60-million in 2013; by the time the flighty, one-dimensional Wallace wore out his welcome by the end of 2014; Ireland was already gone.

Then came “Bullygate,” in which Richie Incognito and other offensive linemen, with no interference from line coach Jim Turner, harassed young offensive tackle Jonathan Martin until he quit the team. Philbin was fired for his lack of control over the locker room, with Dan Campbell making his debut on the NFL’s main stage as the Dolphins’ interim coach. Tannehill muddled through 2015 behind an offensive line cobbled together from guys who completed every phase of the Appropriate Workplace Behavior seminar, targeting Jarvis Landry 166 times over the short middle of the field, because what else was he supposed to do?

It’s taken three dense paragraphs to get to Adam Freakin’ Gase, so you should now have a renewed sense of how snakebit Tannehill’s Dolphins career really was.

Tannehill’s late-career Titans renaissance suggests that there was a significantly better quarterback lurking within him, just waiting for a general manager and/or head coach who weren’t barking mad and teammates who weren’t ripped from an after school special. That’s why he ranks above the next two quarterbacks on our countdown

4. Tua Tagovailoa

Tagovailoa’s 2022 and 2023 seasons were better than Jay Fiedler’s two best seasons. The narratives around the quarterbacks and seasons are very different, as are the supporting casts and play styles of the two sets of teams. But Tua has a yardage and a passer rating crown on his side, while Fiedler has a playoff win in which he threw three interceptions.

Tagovailoa’s last two seasons were also better than any Ryan Tannehill seasons, but Tannehill had more kinda-sorta-decent seasons for a weaker Dolphins team. I cannot help but wonder what Tannehill would have done with Mike McDaniel and/or Tyreek Hill, or what might have happened to Tua under Gase. (Brian Flores, after all, nearly broke him with his rotating cast of coordinators and quick hook.) 

I’m not ready to assume a string of two-or-more Pro Bowl seasons for Tua: he keeps sputtering out by the playoffs, and at presstime it looked like the Dolphins might play chicken with his contract extension. So Tagovailoa is parked here until he makes his next move. 

5. Jay Fiedler

Fiedler went undrafted out of Dartmouth in 1995. He spent a few years on the Eagles extended roster, impressing coordinator Jon Gruden but never throwing a pass. He played in the World League of American Football. He coached briefly at Hofstra. He made it back to the NFL for cameos with the Vikings and Jaguars. He signed with the Dolphins in 2000 in what looked like it would be his last third-string stint before returning to small-college coaching. Instead, he outperformed Damon Huard in camp and became the replacement for the recently-retired Dan Marino, leading the Dolphins to an 11-5 record and the second round of the playoffs.

"I've just gone about handling my own business and not worrying about any comparisons," Fiedler said of replacing Marino, during the 2001 preseason (per Jim Jenkins). "I'm not trying to put myself in Dan Marino's shoes and say I have to do what he did for 17 years. I have to play within myself and lead this team in different ways."

Fiedler was a pesky scrambler with a come-from-nowhere underdog origin story. That made him a fine candidate to replace Marino: he was easy to root for, his mobility was exciting and refreshing, and the expectations surrounding him were easy to exceed. Hall of Famers Jason Taylor and Zach Thomas led a Dolphins defense built by Jimmy Johnson and coached by Dave Wannstedt, and Fiedler’s gutsy-guy routine proved sufficient for winning games by scores like 10-3, 19-6, 17-7 and 17-14. 

Fiedler threw three interceptions against Peyton Manning’s Colts in the Wild Card round of the 2000 playoffs, but he also led a fourth-quarter drive to force overtime, with the Dolphins winning at the end. A look at the drive itself establishes the Fiedler vibe succinctly:

Fiedler made the Sports Illustrated cover in October, 2001, when the NFL returned to action after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Fiedler, a New Yorker, dove for a two-yard touchdown to lead the Dolphins to a last-second 18-15 comeback over the Raiders on a day when many of us weren’t completely sure things would ever return to normal. 

"It allowed us as athletes to be able to get our focus away from what was going on,” Fiedler later said, per Travis Wingfield of the Dolphins website. “We realized that life does move on and we had to keep pushing forward. We translated that to getting back on the field and allowing America to heal and give them a bit of normalcy after a couple weeks of grieving." Again, the erudite, workmanlike Fiedler was the right man at that moment for a nation seeking everyday heroes.

The Dolphins went 11-5 again in 2001, this time with a snappier offense, though Fiedler threw 19 interceptions. Fiedler missed the middle of the 2002 season with a fractured thumb, then suffered a knee injury late in the 2003 season. His sack total spiked after the knee injury, and a herniated disc shelved him at the end of 2004. 

Nick Saban replaced Wannstedt, and Fiedler was released while dealing with yet another injury during training camp in 2005. Fiedler is still the last quarterback to lead the Dolphins to a playoff win, though again: the beauty of the quarterback’s performance in that victory is in the eye of the beholder.

There’s an alternate universe in which Gruden says f**k it and convinces Ray Rhodes to give Fiedler some starts for the late-1990s Eagles. Fiedler then goes on to throw about 10,000 more career yards, reach the playoffs a few more times and have more of an Alex Smith-shaped career. 

In our universe, Fiedler became a starter at 29 and was too banged up to be useful by 33, and he came by the pesky game manager title too honestly. Still, he was a fine quarterback who left behind a few indelible memories. 

6-7. Don Strock, Earl Morrall

Two of the most important backup quarterbacks in pro football history.

8. David Woodley

The holder of perhaps one of the most inflated won-lost records (27-12-1 with the Dolphins) you can find without looking up the 1930s New York Yankees: Strock and Griese led comebacks in many of Woodley’s “wins.” Woodley was an athletic marvel who just refused to develop, but Don Shula could not bring himself to give up on him. The Justin Fields of the early 1980s.

9. Chad Henne

Coulda been a Morrall-type if Patrick Mahomes weren’t so darn healthy.

10. Matt Moore

Chad Pennington was also an option here. We will talk about him soon enough. I was tempted to list Jay Cutler here, if only to relive highlights like this:

And this:

Next Week: I try to contextualize two decades of Tom Brady and untangle one decade of Steve Grogan controversies as we examine the Top 5 QBs in New England Patriots history. Premium subscribers only!