What I actually wanted that off season was to sign Matt Flynn. You'll laugh, and that's OK. But I didn't want JUST him. I didn't want JUST one guy. I wanted TWO. I wanted two shots on goal. That was my preference.
I'd looked at the draft quite a bit, as I always do. I had two guys in mind that I wanted to see if I could get with my 2nd round pick. The first, and I will always admit he was the higher ranked guy for me, because that's the truth, but the first was Brandon Weeden. The second was Russell Wilson. Both players to me were true BOOM-OR-BUST picks. They were either going to be incredible NFL quarterbacks, or they were going to be...awful draft picks. That's how I saw them.
I thought, you get Matt Flynn who knows Joe Philbin's offense and has shown some promise coming in for Aaron Rodgers, and that gives you a margin of safety. It puts a FLOOR under your plan. From there, you really roll the dice on guys like Weeden or Wilson in the 2nd round, because that could give you a really high CEILING.
Ryan Tannehill was the alternative plan, for me. I saw him as a low ceiling, high floor draft pick. He had too many skills, too good a character to ever really be a bad quarterback. But was he ever going to be a great one? Didn't seem likely, to me. He just didn't have that sort of information processing ability, that sort of consistency, awareness, high performance level.
It's funny but the Seahawks ended up with my plan, and the Dolphins ended up with the plan that it was rumored Pete Carroll really wanted (he was rumored to covet Tannehill at 15 overall). That said, once the Dolphins passed up on Matt Flynn I thought they had to go with Tannehill or Weeden in the 1st round because they'd lost that margin of safety. Couldn't go boom-or-bust at that point.
My opinions on all these quarterbacks change over time, by necessity. You find out new information about these guys, and it changes your view. Russell Wilson is no longer a boom or bust player, a player whose height could be the fatal flaw that prevents his incredible talent from taking over. He's one of the best QBs playing the game today.
Meanwhile Brandon Weeden is...a BUST. Just couldn't handle an NFL pocket. Couldn't process NFL information quickly enough. Too old to be given much time to figure it out.
But I think i can honestly say that my opinion of Ryan Tannehill probably hasn't changed much in six years. He's still the low ceiling, high floor guy.