One point that I seldom see made about Fitzpatrick is that he has zero 'old guy' issues to contend with. He's got spring in his step, his arm is as good as it's ever been (no degradation there, to speak of), so with no physical deterioration to mitigate his experience, we literally have the best version of Ryan Fitzpatrick compared to any other point in his career.
For most older players, you have to balance out experience with physical deterioration. Also, the older guys start to 'hear the footsteps' more towards the end of the career. They get hit more often because they're not as mobile and the game kinda 'speeds up on 'em'. They start letting the eyes drop to what's around them instead of keeping the vision down the field. Fitzpatrick shows none of those things.
Fitzpatrick could go out there any team and outperform Andy Dalton or any of the older guys in the league. I think Fitzpatrick is even currently better than Philip Rivers.
So, I think it's gotta mess with Tua's head a little to play with this guy waiting in the wings. I think Tua's intentions are good and he cares about the team success and 'swallowing his pride' is probably not much of a thing.....but...it's still got to haunt him a little knowing that 2 or 3 bad plays, even if it's just taking a sack or missing 1 throw, means he's getting sat down like a child in a 'timeout'.
That gets taken care of during the offseason as Tua gets a full offseason to grow. Bringing in younger QB behind Tua makes the 'looking over the shoulder' thing way worse than bringing Fitzpatrick back.
I think there's a quite a few teams that would've won more games than they did if Fitzpatrick was their QB. Chicago is one of them.
Miami probably wins the Denver game, barely, but prolly get over the top if Fitz plays the whole game. However, beating Buffalo or KC is still not happening, IMO. The best Fitzpatrick does for the 2020 Dolphins is get us Into a 1st round playoff game, which we would lose because our roster is a step-down in talent compared to any of the playoff teams.
I feel that Flores did the best possible course of action for preparing this team to win starting next year, which includes getting Tua the experience he did get while showing your roster that anyone can be replaced based on performance.
