While meeting with the media on Wednesday afternoon, Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa addressed a clip from ESPN NFL analyst Ryan Clark. While discussing the Dolphins’ most recent preseason game, Clark brought up Tagovailoa’s build, which the former No. 5 overall pick did not appreciate.
Tua Tagovailoa with some strong words for Ryan Clark pic.twitter.com/ihGd3dXZC2
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“He probably knows more about me than I know about myself, I don’t know, Ryan’s been out of the league for some time,” Tagovailoa said. “It’s a little weird when other people are talking about other people when they’re not that person. Just a little weird.
“My background is, I come from a Samoan family. Respect is everything, but it does get to a point where, hey, you know, little easy on that buddy. I think we’re pretty tough-minded people, and if we need to get scrappy, we can get scrappy, too. Just saying.”
This comes in response to comments Clark made on ESPN one day prior, when the NFL analyst said that Tagovailoa “wasn’t in the gym” during the offseason.
“He might’ve spent a lot of time at the tattoo parlor, he was not at the dinner table eating what the nutritionist had advised,” Clark said. “He looks happy, he is thick. He’s built like a girl who works at Onyx in Atlanta right now on the bottom.”
While Clark went on to say that Tagovailoa looked great during the Dolphins’ preseason game against the Houston Texans, his comments about Tagovailoa’s build caught much more attention. And when Clark addressed them on Twitter, he made it a point to say that while he was joking around, “if asked why I said it by Tua I would tell him.”
As Marcel Louis-Jacques of ESPN noted, Tagovailoa spent the offseason bulking up in an effort to prepare his body for playing an entire NFL season.