With the Miami Dolphins Tanking, We'll Never Truly Find Out Who Josh Rosen Is

As if there were ever a doubt, the Miami Dolphins' trade of Laremy Tunsil and Kenny Stills to the Houston Texans this past Saturday for two future first-round picks and a second-round pick cements the obvious: The team is in full-fledged tank mode. Woof. They're gonna be baaaaad, and 2019 will be a long, torturous, unintentionally comedy-filled mess. But it always was going to be anyway, so it's good to see Miami embracing the stink in the name of being less stinky in the future.

Though the process makes all the sense in the world, one cog of the rebuilding machine still doesn't compute: the handling of Josh Rosen. It's puzzling, to say the least.

The Dolphins spent a second-round and fifth-round pick on Rosen — a top ten pick in the 2018 draft. They obviously saw something in him. But even after he outperformed journeyman Ryan Fitzpatrick in the preseason by a wide margin, the Dolphins have decided Rosen is best served holding a clipboard on the sidelines to start the season.

Why? Some say it's to save Rosen from the "hard" part of the schedule. Some say it's so he can learn more. Others think the Dolphins just don't think he's better than Fitzpatrick at this time.

None of that makes any sense, and it's clear at this point that the Dolphins wasted draft picks on Rosen if they aren't interested in seeing what he can do now, instead of waiting for their bad team to become even worse as the season progresses.

One thing cannot be disputed: Josh Rosen will not have a fair shake in Miami this season. The team is being torn down around him. The Dolphins just traded a Pro Bowl left tackle and his best offensive weapon for picks that will likely be used to replace him. If and when Rosen gets in the game, the Dolphins will probably be overmatched, and he will be running for his life on every single play, forced to throw 50 times because the Dolphins are always playing from behind.

So again, we ask: Why did the Dolphins trade for Rosen if their plan was to tank, rebuild, and rid themselves of any shot of seeing who he really is? If the Dolphins wanted to see how Rosen performed on a team that was destined for the first-overall pick in the next year's draft, they should have just popped in a tape of him playing for the Cardinals his rookie season. Instead, they decided to pay the price of a high draft pick and a fifth not to even put him under center. Huh?

It's now clear the Dolphins should trade Rosen, recoup some value for him, and ready themselves to trade a quarterback of their liking in the 2020 NFL draft, one littered with a plethora of potentially franchise-changing quarterbacks.

The Josh Rosen experiment has ended before the Dolphins even gave it a real chance. That's a shame, and it cost the Dolphins draft picks that could have been spent on players who would have made a difference this season.