Miami Dolphins: Josh Rosen stepping into another awful situation

Josh Rosen is getting the start against the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday and is  stepping into another train wreck of a situation.

The Arizona Cardinals traded up for Josh Rosen in the 2018 NFL Draft, and threw him into a dysfunctional situation after veteran quarterback Sam Bradford played in three games and then just all of a sudden was done with the game.

The Cardinals, predictably, would go on to earn the number one overall pick in the 2019 NFL Draft, and wound up trading Rosen after hiring Kliff Kingsbury, who wanted to build around Kyler Murray.

The Dolphins, in what felt like a back-and-forth eBay bidding war, finally took Rosen off the Cardinals’ hands by trading a late second-round pick in the 2019 NFL Draft for a guy who was a top draft choice just one year earlier.

Then, despite not really having a better alternative with only Ryan Fitzpatrick on the roster in addition to Rosen as a viable starting candidate, the Dolphins fabricated a quarterback battle, which Fitzpatrick — the guy who has been in the NFL for just shy of 100 years — obviously won.

Rosen was relegated to bench duty for two weeks, but gets to repeat almost exactly what happened last year and take over for the team on the fast-track to next year’s no. 1 overall pick.

Not every quarterback gets to step into a great situation coming out of college. In fact, most of the best QB prospects go to dysfunctional situations just by the nature of the beast that is the NFL Draft.

The worst teams get the best players.

But Rosen has been dealt a difficult hand here, getting traded to Miami, a team that seemingly didn’t really want him and was certainly in no hurry to name him their starter. Now he’s gone through training camp competing for a starting job (and more importantly, splitting valuable reps) with a guy who is by no means the future of the Dolphins in Fitzpatrick, only to be handed the reins to the worst team in the league heading into a matchup against the loaded Dallas Cowboys.

Good luck?

Rosen isn’t getting a great opportunity here, he’s basically getting a 14-game, case-by-case evaluation period for the Dolphins and 31 other teams who might be interested in him at season’s end.

If Rosen does really well, the Dolphins will obviously keep him around and wonder why they wasted an entire offseason not building around him. If he does poorly, he’s going to be on a plane to another NFL city, hopefully a more favorable situation, in 2020.