Tua Tagovailoa is in a different place now, but the lessons that carried him through a rough exit from Miami are still with him.
After the Dolphins moved on from him at the end of last season, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback said he leaned on advice from his former Alabama coach, Nick Saban, to get through the uncertainty.
“It's hard to go through something like that,” Tagovailoa said of his Dolphins release. “One thing that I ended up taking from Coach Saban that stuck with me as I was going through that process-being benched last year, not being able to finish out the season with the guys, and then, obviously, being released by the Dolphins and being a free agent-was, ‘Things don't happen to you.
They happen for you.' And that kind of stuck with me.”
Tagovailoa said he couldn’t point to one exact reason for what happened in Miami, but the message gave him something to hold onto while his future was in limbo.
"You gotta have perspective....."
— SiriusXM NFL Radio (@SiriusXMNFL) August 18, 2026
Tua Tagovailoa on leaving Miami, landing in Atlanta and the advice from Nick Saban that he has leaned on.
📻 https://t.co/dbQUay1t03@AtlantaFalcons I #DirtyBirds I @JacobHester18 pic.twitter.com/DOqmrqhKcv
Now he’s set to matter in a big way for Atlanta in 2026. The Falcons have plenty of offensive talent around him, and with Michael Penix Jr. recovering from a knee injury, Tagovailoa will be running the offense for at least the first few weeks of the season.
That makes this one of the most attractive backup quarterback situations in the NFL this year. And with more help around him than he had in recent seasons with the Dolphins, Tagovailoa’s path in Atlanta does feel like one of those moments that, as Saban put it, happened for him.
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