Ryan Tannehill: ‘Different feeling coming into this camp’ with Dolphins

This is no ordinary training camp for Miami Dolphins quarterback Ryan Tannehill.

When you’ve been away from the game as long as Tannehill, who missed the final three games of the 2016 season and all of last year after undergoing knee surgery, you appreciate what you do for a living even more once you have the chance to do it again.

‘Being able to go back out and do what I love now, I think there’s a little bit more of an appreciation for it’

“It’s a little bit different feeling coming into this camp as opposed to some of the other camps I’ve had just because of the appreciation to get to play the game,” Tannehill told Jim Miller and Pat Kirwan during the SiriusXM NFL Radio training-camp tour stop at the Dolphins’ facility in Davie, Fla. “It’s a little bit different this year. Just being on the sideline last year, having to go through what I went through and having the game taken away. But being able to go back out and do what I love now, I think there’s a little bit more of an appreciation for it.”

That shows in everything Tannehill does in practice. As coach Adam Gase points out, Tannehill is an absolute perfectionist who is never satisfied unless everything he does is flawless.

‘You want to be perfect, you want to have the ball in the right location’

“I try to make it as perfect as I can,” he said. “That’s our job as a quarterback. You want to be perfect, you want to have the ball in the right location, not just get (the receiver) the rock, but get it on the right shoulder where he can catch and run. Throw away from the defender, get us in the right play. Make sure we’re taking the right steps to get the back of the ball in the right location so he can make his read correctly.

“So there’s a lot of different levels that go into playing the position and I want to be right in all of them.”

‘I definitely think I grew over the past year and a half’

Although Tannehill hasn’t played a game that counted since Dec. 11, 2016, he was able to watch and do plenty of learning since. He feels he has prospered greatly from that.

“I definitely think I grew over the past year and a half,” he said. “I wasn’t physically taking reps, physically playing games (in 2017), but I was in all the meetings. I was in the install meetings, I was in the game-planning meetings and I tried to stay as mentally locked-in as I could over the course of the season. And learn from the other guys. There’s a lot of good reps that happened on tape last year, good and bad, things that I can learn from. And now I don’t have to make those same mistakes. I’ve kind of filed those away.

‘I feel like I kept going forward even though I wasn’t physically taking reps’

“I was taking notes just like I was getting ready to play each and every week, and I can now take step forward from there as opposed to taking a step back and having to get back to where I was. I feel like I kept going forward even though I wasn’t physically taking reps.”