Taulia Tagovailoa’s life in the shadow of his brother, and why his NFL future is uncertain
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Heather Dinich, ESPN Senior Writer
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — For about two hours on a recent March morning, Maryland‘s indoor football facility was quiet enough to hear the smack of the ball hitting the receivers’ hands at the Terps’ pro day.
With 51 representatives from all 32 NFL teams watching and taking notes, the auditions were consequential and, at times, tense — until the reggae music began blasting through the speakers.
The song by artist Lucky Dube was a special request from the Big Ten’s all-time leading passer, Hawaii native Taulia Tagovailoa, as he began to showcase his arm strength with some deep passes.
“I’m an island boy,” Tagovailoa said with a smile following his throwing session, noting the braids sprouting from the top of his head as evidence of his laid-back, pro day vibe.
As the younger brother of Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, it’s impossible for Taulia to forget where he came from — or where he’s trying to go. The two brothers, once teammates at Alabama, continue to forge their own paths but are forever linked by Tua’s success — the barometer by which Taulia will always be measured. And while Taulia leaves Maryland as one of the most decorated quarterbacks in school history, his potential to go undrafted leaves him in a familiar position — looking up at his brother, the No. 5 overall pick in 2020.
“That’s one of the things when Taulia came here that was a concern of mine because I understood the family dynamics, understood being in Tua’s shadow,” said Maryland coach Mike Locksley, who recruited Taulia when he was the offensive coordinator at Alabama before reuniting with him at Maryland. “But what I’ve been able to see, and if you ever get to know the kid, he’s a kid that’s really stood on his own.
“His stats provide that data to show that he’s a guy that can make those type of plays. I thought he handled — because of his love for his brother — being in that shadow as an honor, rather than something as a hindrance.”
TUA, A 2023 Pro Bowl selection, has started 51 NFL games, completed 66.9% of his passes (second best in team history) and has the best passer rating (97.1) in Dolphins history. In 2022, at just 24 years old, Tua became the youngest NFL quarterback since Dan Marino in 1984 to lead the league in passer rating, with his 105.5 just a notch above reigning Super Bowl champion Patrick Mahomes (105.2).
It’s a standard Taulia said he considers a “big blessing” as he works to join Tua at the professional level. But the NCAA played a role in his decision to enter the draft earlier than Taulia had hoped. In early January, Tagovailoa entered the NCAA transfer portal and filed a waiver with the NCAA for a sixth year of eligibility to improve his draft stock.
“The opportunities these kids have with the extra year, the NIL piece, that’s a smart business decision that Taulia made, his family and his group decided,” Locksley said. “I thought it was a great decision on his part to maximize the financial gains of college if you’re not maybe where you see yourself at the next level.”
Taulia’s waiver request focused on the circumstances surrounding his freshman season in 2019, when he was Alabama’s third-string quarterback behind his brother, who was the starter, and backup Mac Jones. That season, Taulia played in five games — barely.
He played four total snaps in two of those games, including a 38-7 route at Mississippi State when he entered to honor Tua, who suffered a severe hip injury earlier in the game. The maximum threshold for redshirting is playing in four games. The 2020 season doesn’t count toward eligibility because of rules that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, which would have left Taulia another year to play if he had redshirted in 2019.
“Going into college you always have goals, and I just wanted more,” he said. “I felt like I left a lot of plays out on the field, and with another year, I felt it was going to be another opportunity to show what I can do and maybe improve on the things I didn’t do well the past couple of years. That’s all I was trying to do with getting another year.”
Maryland filed the waiver on his behalf, and coach Nick Saban and Alabama wrote a letter of support to the NCAA, according to ESPN sources. The NCAA denied his request a few weeks later, and Tagovailoa left for California, where he trained for Maryland’s pro day.
The NCAA declined to comment on the case.
“When the NCAA didn’t accept it, I felt like it was God’s plan for me to — I mean, I only had one decision,” Taulia said, “to go to the NFL draft.”
TAULIA’S PATH WAS more indirect than his brother’s from the start, even though they both began at Alabama.
Tua quickly made a name for himself as a freshman in 2017, when Saban made the historic coaching decision of benching Jalen Hurts at halftime of the national championship game against Georgia in favor of Tua. He threw the winning touchdown pass in overtime and was named the game’s offensive MVP.
In 2019, when Taulia was a freshman at Alabama, his older brother reached the peak of his collegiate career before suffering the season-ending injury at Mississippi State in mid-November. Despite having his Alabama career cut short by injury, Tua finished his junior season as the program leader in total touchdowns with 96 (87 passing, nine rushing).
Meanwhile, Taulia completed nine passes for 100 yards and one touchdown in five games. With Jones the heir apparent to Tua at Alabama, Taulia transferred to Maryland following the 2019 season in search of more playing time.
He found it.
Taulia finished his collegiate career with 11,356 passing yards, eclipsing almost every Maryland passing record along the way. He set a school mark for touchdowns (77), career completions (955), career completion percentage (67.1) and career 300-yard games (15).
Despite his eye-popping numbers, Taulia wasn’t invited to the NFL combine. Taulia is also not listed among the 257 players ESPN NFL draft analyst Matt Miller projects to be chosen in the seven rounds.
As scouts watched him at Maryland’s pro day, the reviews were similar — Taulia is a “camp player only right now.”
“He has experience, was very productive in college, is very athletic and can extend plays,” one NFL scout told ESPN. “He escapes the pocket too soon, though, and his accuracy on film is not good.”‘
Taulia said his brother has been giving him advice.
“I want to be where he’s at, and he helps me a lot,” Taulia said. “The biggest thing for me, he knows how to talk to me. I’m more like, ‘What should I do? Just tell me what it is; don’t beat around.’ Basically, just be myself and have fun.
“It’s not a make-or-break thing if I don’t do good. It’s just being right with myself and making sure I’m at peace with everything and putting in the work the right way.”
Taulia had an impressive showing at the East-West Shrine Bowl, where he completed nine passes for 142 yards and no interceptions. He also added a rushing touchdown.
He said his strengths are throwing the football from the shotgun and being on the move and scrambling — he had 201 career rushing yards and 13 rushing touchdowns for the Terps — but felt his arm strength has been one of the scouts’ biggest questions. One NFL scout agreed, and told ESPN that overall, Taulia is “not a pocket passer and plays small.”
“He has to be outside the pocket to make throws and see,” the scout said. “He’s not consistent enough.”
Locksley said Taulia’s biggest growth since his freshman season at Alabama has been the “football intelligence piece.”
“Throwing the football’s not the question,” Locksley said. “What I’ve seen Taulia be able to do, with this father who’s trained two NFL quarterbacks, is the mental piece of it, the maturity that comes with being able to make the right decision at the right time. I’ve seen that growth, I’ve seen the football maturity out of Taulia, and he will make somebody’s NFL team because he is talented enough.”
Locksley also noted that Taulia has had success in Maryland’s pro-style system, which will equate to him being able to play for any team in the NFL.
“I know I’m a leader and a hard worker,” Taulia said. “I’ve earned the respect of people in the locker room, every locker room I’ve went to. I’m a competitor and I love my teammates. That’s the biggest thing, you earning their respect. I’m going to give it my all in everything I do.”
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Bradford Doolittle
Which version of the 2025 Atlanta Braves is the real version of the 2025 Atlanta Braves?
The first few weeks of the season were quite a journey, one akin to a roller-coaster ride that, like the amusement park attraction, ended more or less where it began — at the beginning.
Entering the season, the Braves were considered the biggest threat to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ supremacy in the National League. While the Dodgers (preseason over/under of 103.5 wins at ESPN BET) were in a tier of their own, the Braves (93.5) topped the next tier, just ahead of a pair of division rivals in the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets.
Then Opening Day arrived, with the Braves starting off on a tough seven-game road trip against the San Diego Padres and Dodgers. Atlanta lost all seven games, scoring no runs or one run in four of those defeats.
That is not the way to knock the Dodgers off the mountaintop. Indeed, the old adage about early-season baseball has always been that you can’t win the pennant in April, but you might very well lose it. In becoming the 30th team since 1901 to begin a season with seven straight losses, the Braves flirted with some discouraging history.
Still, the Braves’ April story was as much defined by how they eventually responded to that early slump. Atlanta continued to flounder into the middle of the month, but then reeled off nine wins in 11 games, nearly leveling the ship.
The Braves haven’t yet reached the .500 mark this season, but it seems inevitable they soon will — and they already pushed their run differential out of negative territory. All in all, Atlanta can at least exhale after the initial stumbles.
To sum it up: Atlanta entered the campaign anointed as the Dodgers’ prime challenger — 2025 Braves version 1. They proceeded to put up one of the 30 worst starts in 125 years — 2025 Braves version 2. And before April was over, they’d already climbed back to break-even (or thereabouts) which, in effect, resets their near-disastrous season — 2025 Braves version 3.
Three very different versions of the same team. Which leads back to our initial question: Which Braves are the real Braves?
The 0-7 Braves make ugly history
As mentioned, the Braves are now one of 30 teams to begin a season 0-7, and it’s the fifth time a Braves club has appeared on that list, joining 1919, 1980, 1988 and 2016. That ties the Detroit Tigers for the most of any franchise.
Historically speaking, a start that bad and that prolonged rings the death knell in terms of pennant contention. None of the first 29 teams on the list made the playoffs. Indeed, only two managed to finish over .500, and none of the 29 ended with a positive run differential.
Thus, if the Braves complete their rapid climb back to .500 and keep that run differential in the black, they will have already subverted every other team on the 0-7 list. This really is not that surprising, because the 2025 Braves are way better than those other 29 teams.
In my historical database, among the various team measures I have are three-year power ratings, used to identify how strong (or not strong) teams were in multiseason windows. If we use Atlanta’s season-opening over/under figure as a proxy for their 2025 level, we can estimate their three-year power rating at 95.6 (or 95.6 wins per 162 games).
Only two of the other 29 teams on the 0-7 list had three-year power ratings of 81 or better — the 1945 Boston Red Sox and the 1983 Astros. Boston had a 86.6 three-year power rating, but it was a special case because of the sudden change in rosters across baseball tracing to players returning from military service. The 1945 Red Sox did not have Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr or Johnny Pesky. But the 1946 Red Sox had all of them, and won the pennant. A very different case than the 2025 Braves.
The 1983 Astros were more akin to these Braves, and were one of the two 0-7 starters that climbed back over .500 by the end of the season. (The other was the 1980 Braves, who finished 81-80 while being outscored by 30 runs.) Houston ended up 85-77 after its terrible start, which actually stretched to nine straight season-opening losses. The Astros finished three runs in the red in differential, however, and had a three-year power rating of 81.4, more than 14 wins shy of the current Braves.
So, of the 30 teams that started 0-7, the Braves were the most likely of them to bounce back from such a terrible beginning. They spent the last half of April proving that to be the case.
How the offense has helped fuel their turnaround
We’ve already noted how anemic the Braves’ offense was during their opening road trip. Atlanta averaged just two runs per game and batted .151 as a team during the skid. The Braves’ collective team OPS (.485) was the worst in baseball.
It took a while, but the Braves’ bats have heated up. Heading into their series with the Dodgers, Atlanta had scored 4.9 runs per game (10th in MLB) and posted a .779 OPS (fifth) since their slump. They’ve done this even as they continue to wait on Ronald Acuna Jr.’s season debut after last year’s knee surgery.
The drivers of the offensive uptick have been a little surprising. Sean Murphy had clubbed seven homers in 17 games since coming off the IL, one season after he hit 10 in 72 contests. Young catcher Drake Baldwin had a 1.009 OPS since April 3 and 30-year-old Eli White was at 1.012.
Those surprising outbursts, along with the expected contributions of Marcell Ozuna and Austin Riley, have helped the offense recover even as Matt Olson (.767 OPS), Michael Harris II (.614) and Ozzie Albies (.664) were still seeking to reach their career levels.
Still, issues linger
The Braves’ pitching still rates as roughly league average for the season as a whole. Last season’s NL Cy Young winner Chris Sale has been inconsistent so far, leaving Spencer Schwellenbach as the only rotation member producing at league average or better.
Sale should be fine, but the Braves very much need their big two to become a big three because of what looks like a lack of high-quality rotation depth. In other words, after getting just one start out of Spencer Strider over the season’s first few weeks, they need him to get healthy and stay that way. Strider (Grade 1 hamstring strain) is expected to return later this month.
In the bullpen, the Braves have been so-so, mostly because of the struggles of star closer Raisel Iglesias to keep the ball in the yard. After surrendering just four long balls in all of 2024, Iglesias coughed up five homers in his first 11 outings. Because the pitching has underachieved, the Braves’ bounce-back has been more warm than boiling.
But the recovery has been undergirded by pretty strong indicators. Atlanta’s run differential during the recent 14-9 stretch is equivalent to a 94-win team over a full season, putting the Braves on par with preseason expectations during that span. The problem of course is that 0-7 start.
The other problem is that the National League is full of really good teams.
Have you heard the NL is stacked?
The Braves sat at 14-16 through 30 games. Let’s say they maintain the 94-win quality they reached during their recovery over their remaining 132 games. That’s a .580 winning percentage, which gets Atlanta to 90 or 91 wins by the end of the season.
If all the teams in the NL were to maintain their current paces (which is admittedly unlikely), there would be five teams that finished with 96 wins or more — the Mets, Dodgers, Padres, Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants.
You can see the Braves’ dilemma: Only one playoff slot would be up for grabs. If Atlanta is able to get to 90 or 91 wins, it would be in the mix, but would need to hope that neither Philadelphia nor the Arizona Diamondbacks (both on pace for 88 wins) catch fire, or that one of the top five fall off.
The forecasts don’t rule out anything. At FanGraphs, the Braves are making the playoffs in about 70% of simulations, as their model sees the NL East contenders as better than the non-Dodgers contenders in the NL West. Baseball Prospectus has the Braves getting to 92 wins but reaching the playoffs just 54% of the time.
Finally, at ESPN BET, the Braves’ over/under for wins has fallen to 88.5, the same as Arizona but less than the Mets (94.5), Phillies (91.5) and Padres (89.5). The upstart Giants are at 84.5.
The Braves are back in the running, but those seven games, along with the strength of the top of the NL, have reduced their margin of error considerably.
How well will they play in May — and beyond — and will it be enough?
Atlanta’s season might depend on, well, May, or these key upcoming weeks before Strider and Acuna rejoin the team. However they got here, the Braves are currently a middle-of-the-pack team at the bottom line, both in the win-loss column and by run differential. If they continue at this level while waiting for their stars to return, the strong upper tier of the NL could move away from them.
The upcoming schedule, beginning with the current series against the Dodgers, is tough in ways both obvious and sneaky.
After L.A. departs on Sunday, the over-.500 Cincinnati Reds visit, before Atlanta travels to play the Pittsburgh Pirates. There are two series against the Washington Nationals, one at home and one away, and if you’re still thinking of the Nats as pushovers, you haven’t been paying attention.
There’s a return match with San Diego, a trip to Boston, a visit from the Red Sox, and a key three-game set on the road against the Phillies. It’s not an easy docket for any club, but especially for one missing two of its biggest stars.
The Braves have mostly righted their teetering ship after their stunning start. Since those seven opening losses, they’ve been what we thought they would be. Chances are, as the season progresses, players find their level and the roster gets healthier, that will continue to be the case.
The real Braves weren’t the team that started 0-7. They might be the team that’s played much better since. Now, in what’s shaping up as a crowded and strong upper tier in the NL playoff hierarchy, they have to hope that even if they maintain their expected level, it proves to be good enough for another trip to October.
BOSTON — Red Sox first baseman Triston Casas suffered what manager Alex Cora called a “significant” left knee injury after he awkwardly fell near first base in the bottom of the second inning against the Minnesota Twins on Friday night.
Speaking after Boston’s 6-1 win, Cora said Casas was taken to a local hospital, where he was undergoing more tests on the knee. He said the team would have more information Saturday.
Casas sent a slow roller up the first-base line that Twins starter Joe Ryan bobbled before making an underhand throw to first baseman Ty France. Casas, who was ruled safe on the Ryan error, collapsed to the ground holding his knee as he crossed the bag.
He was carried off the field on a stretcher and replaced by Romy Gonzalez.
“Seemed like he was in shock, to be honest with you,” Cora told reporters. “He said it right away that he didn’t feel it. …. It’s tough.
“He put so much effort in the offseason. I know how he works. Everything he went through in the offseason getting ready for this. He was looking forward to having a big season for us. It didn’t start the way he wanted, but he kept grinding, kept working. And now this happened.”
Casas entered Friday hitting .184 with three home runs in 28 games.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
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