Closing the Book on the Rosen Chapter
The next chapter of Josh Rosen's NFL career again will take place in Florida, but this time on the west side of the state with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Multiple reports indicated Sunday that Rosen would be joining the Buccaneers practice squad, even though he wasn't among the 15 players the team officially announced for that group in the afternoon.
In Tampa, he'll get to learn behind so-called quarterback whisperer Bruce Arians and get to watch Tom Brady practice every day. He'll also be reunited with his former Arizona Cardinals offensive coordinator, former NFL quarterback Byron Leftwich.
Maybe the Buccaneers can succeed where the Cardinals and Dolphins failed and get Rosen to live up to the promise that came with his selection as the 10th overall pick in the 2018 draft.
For the Dolphins, the news Sunday means an official end to the Rosen chapter, one that began and ended in controversial moves.
In the end, one can question why the Dolphins were in such a hurry to waive Rosen just 17 months after giving up second- and fifth-round picks to acquire him in a trade. That no team claimed Rosen off waivers certainly validates the idea that nobody wanted to be on the hook for his guaranteed salary over the next two seasons.
That salary will cost the Dolphins just about $5 million in dead space this year.
Moving on from Rosen also left the Dolphins with two quarterback on the 53-man roster, which might be a dicey proposition this season given all the uncertainty created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
What's clear by the move is the coaching staff had seen enough from Rosen and simply wanted to move on.
While there were no preseason games to gauge any improvement Rosen might have made, what we saw in 2019 clearly was problematic in terms of his decision-making and processing time in the pocket, which left him holding the ball for too long far too many times.
While it's well documented that Rosen constantly has had to deal with new offensive coordinators, his ability to read defenses, see the field and make quick decisions in the pocket should be a lot further along.
We're also at the point where we have to wonder whether he'll ever be good enough in that department to be a productive NFL quarterback.
He certainly wasn't that in his short time with the Dolphins, nor was he that in his one season with the Cardinals.
That, of course, brings up the matter of trading two draft picks to get him in the first place.
It's certainly easy to look back and play the results and say it was a terrible trade.
The flip side, though, is that the Dolphins have been quarterback-deficient for so long, it's really difficult to knock them for taking a shot — no matter how far off the mark it turned out to be.
What's fair to question is whether the Dolphins needed to pay that kind of price or whether they should have held out and made the Cardinals lower the asking price.
When the trade first came out, it was presented as the Dolphins getting Rosen AND a fifth-round pick for a second-round pick, and that seemed very palatable then — and it still does now. When it turned out the fifth-round also was going from Miami to Arizona, that made the price a little more problematic.
When the trade was made on the second night of the 2019 draft, the New York Giants and Washington each had taken care of their quarterback situation by taking one in the first round — Daniel Jones and Dwayne Haskins, respectively — and that meant the market for Rosen was now pretty limited.
And it's safe to assume the Cardinals didn't want to have Rosen around one year after taking him in the first round but then taking his replacement with Kyler Murray, no matter how much they tried to convince everyone otherwise.
So, from this end, it's unfair to criticize the Dolphins to making the trade for Rosen, though it's fair to suggest they overpaid. As for his release, well, the timing seemed odd, but if the Dolphins didn't see a point in keeping him and would rather have Jake Rudock as their third quarterback, that's pretty telling in itself.
