“For fans, one of the most reliable narrative tropes is redemption,” Dexter Filkins writes. This year, the Dolphins wowed N.F.L. viewers with the vindication of the team’s chief protagonist, Tua Tagovailoa.
When I lived in Baghdad during the war, I used to link my laptop to a satellite and truck beers across the desert so I could listen to Miami Dolphins games. It was a guilty pleasure, and an expensive one, but I followed professional sports for the same reason most people do: it offered a respite from life’s doldrums. The plotlines were clear, politics were at bay, somebody lost and somebody won.
Nick Saban, the coach at the University of Alabama, the citadel of college football, first visited Tagovailoa when he was an eleventh grader at Saint Louis School, a Catholic institution and football powerhouse in Honolulu. Saban told me that, whenever he visits a recruit, the whole family usually gathers around the dining table. “I like to sit in the middle, so I can see everyone,” Saban said. But Tagovailoa’s father, Galu, insisted that Saban sit at the head.
Tagovailoa’s second year, in some ways, was worse than his first. The team was good—they finished 9–8—but everything else was a disaster. The owner, the New York real-estate tycoon, and the head coach, Brian Flores, loathed each other. As soon as the season ended, Ross fired Flores, whereupon Flores sued the Dolphins and the N.F.L. for what he claimed was league-wide discrimination against Black coaches.
Upon taking the job, McDaniel announced that Tagovailoa would be his starting quarterback, and that he felt just fine about it. The first thing McDaniel did was make a film of Tagovailoa’s best moments, some seven hundred of them, and present the highlight reel to the quarterback. McDaniel, alongside the team’s general manager, Chris Grier, then traded for or drafted a number of players to help make sure that Tagovailoa would succeed.
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