It’s Monday morning, so part of my routine includes taking a look at Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback on SI.com.
Over the last two years, MMQB has become even more intriguing for me personally because I spend every Sunday during the regular season with Peter, and I see how hard he works on the column and how much care and sweat and emotion he puts into harvesting information and presenting it in an 8,000-word manifesto on the biggest stories in the NFL at that moment. From Week One through Week 17, there’s no natural transition for Peter between Sunday night and Monday morning because he doesn’t sleep until the sun is up.
And of course I’m being a little extra effusive in my praise of Peter’s efforts today because there’s something in Peter’s latest offering that has pushed the pendulum in PFT’s direction regarding our Sunday night report that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross is pushing the team to take quarterback Ryan Tannehill with the eighth overall selection in the 2012 draft.
The Dolphins reacted in animated fashion to the report, with a “very, very, very highly placed source” telling Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald that the report isn’t true.
King writes that he heard over the weekend that Ross indeed wants Tannehill, and that the punctuation mark was supplied on Monday. "[T]his morning, I got a call from someone saying Florio was right on,” King writes. “Ross wants the quarterback.”
Peter also points out that Tannehill’s former college coach, who coincidentally now serves as Miami’s offensive coordinator, isn’t pushing for Tannehill as aggressively as believed. Publicly, Mike Sherman has compared his former pupil’s confidence level to Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers; privately, per King, Sherman isn’t standing on the table for Tannehill.
The fact that the Dolphins responded so swiftly and so forcefully could be evidence of frustration that yet another piece of evidence of organizational dysfunction has trickled out of the building. Regardless of the motivation, reacting aggressively to the report sets a precedent that will cause future reports regarding the team to seem true if the Dolphins say nothing.
In this particular case, the fact that they said something opened the door for Peter to confirm that there’s a lot more than nothing to the notion that Ross is nudging the football people to take Tannehill.