Should Tua stay or should he go?

[Pappy13]

Are you kidding me?   Giving a team a first round pick to take our garbage away?  

Well you can either pay for the garbage itself or pay to have it removed. Either way you are paying. It's not like if they don't pay for the garbage to be removed, it disappears all on it's own.

[Pappy13]

The context of the $70M is one bad season; a bad season that, it bears mentioning, would precisely align your need for a new franchise QB with a greater chance of an early pick to select said QB.

Then I hope we are not going to see Malik or any other substantial outlaying of salary cap for a QB, TE or any of the other FA's that Miami has been linked to. Now maybe that's all pure speculation and the Dolphins front office is exactly in line with what you are suggesting, which is to play the hand they have been dealt for 2026 and start looking for that franchise QB starting in 2027. I'm fine if that is what happens, but I'm worried they aren't going to do that. I'm worried they are going to sign high priced FA to compete with Ewers which is a huge mistake if they are just going to cut Tua in my humble opinion. Making a trade to get Tua's contract off the books makes some sense if you are going after Malik, otherwise you have to do what you just said and take a loss for 2026. Let's see if they have the balls to do it.

[Spider-Dan]

Wrong. At least in my case.

I was saying we should make him play out his 5th year, and if we weren't certain (and we shouldn't have been after 2024) then franchise tag him for a year.[/q

The Ravens did exactly that with Jackson, and it hurt neither as he signed a fat deal after he proved himself.

This is factually incorrect.  BAL attempted to extend Jackson in 2022 and he turned it down because he (correctly) believed he could improve his play even more.  After he won a 2nd MVP the following season,  BAL franchise tagged him and Lamar requested a trade.  The resolution of this dispute was that BAL made Lamar the highest paid player in the league (with the biggest signing bonus in history).  

But importantly, Lamar did not play a single game under the franchise tag; in contrast, you're saying Tua should have played an entire season under the tag.  And there are comps for that: Dak Prescott, who the Cowboys have had to wildly overpay with this sort of last-second "but prove it again" negotiation, and Kirk Cousins, who walked for nothing and took the Vikings to the playoffs multiple times, as Washington spent the next decade back in the QB wilderness.

Dak Prescott was tagged, broke his ankle in week 5, and the Cowboys had to give him the largest signing bonus in history anyway to keep him.  Is that the kind of outcome you would prefer?  The alternative is a Kirk Cousins situation where Tua finally proves himself right before he walks out the door for nothing.

The Dolphins do not get to operate in a different QB market than everyone else.  There are fans in GB saying "We're paying Jordan Love fifty million dollars for this?" right now.  HOU is going to have to either extend Stroud at a reasonable price this offseason, "make him prove it" and break the bank next year, or watch him walk just like Baker did in Cleveland.  (The only exceptions are Josh Allen and Justin Herbert, who are somehow allowed to fail over and over and are never blamed for any of their team's problems.)