Can Tua Tagovailoa have a Bart Starr-moment in the cold?
Bart Starr won five NFL championships during his 16 seasons with the Green Bay Packers and the MVP Award for the first two Super Bowls. He was the NFL MVP for the 1966 season and entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame in first year of eligibility.
But the most famous moment of Starr’s football career came on Dec. 31, 1967, when he scored on a quarterback sneak with 13 seconds to play to defeat the Dallas Cowboys 21-17 in the NFL Championship Game and send the Packers to the second Super Bowl.
But what made the touchdown iconic were the conditions in which it was scored. At minus-13 degrees, the game known as the Ice Bowl had the lowest recorded temperature for an NFL contest.
RELATED: BART STARR’S ICONIC TOUCHDOWN WON THE ICE BOWL
Now another former Alabama quarterback will have the opportunity to record a postseason performance punctuated by the cold. When Tua Tagovailoa and the Miami Dolphins take on the Kansas City Chiefs on Saturday night, the kickoff temperature is forecast to be minus-1.
“No one likes being cold,” Miami coach Mike McDaniel said. “That’s why we have temperature control. However, it does make the moment bigger when you know that it is an absolute fact that it’s going to be frigid. Well, what if as a team, you find a way for it to not affect you? To be able to go and do athletic performance in that weather, it takes will. That will comes from a passion that is deep down. …
“It’s about doing something that’s difficult inherently. That motivates you as a competitor, I think. And we have a lot of competitors on our team. I think the places that teams have to go to execute in those types of situations are hard. I think that’s what kind of makes them stand out in history, because you get a lot of cool, spirited efforts by people doing things that a lot of people would struggle to do.”
The Dolphins have historically struggled in cold weather. Miami has lost 10 games in a row that kicked off with a temperature lower than 40 degrees. But the Dolphins won the coldest game in team history, beating Kansas City 38-31 on Dec. 21, 2008, at 10 degrees.
Tagovailoa has played in three sub-40-degree games with Miami. He has completed 70-of-121 passes for 890 yards with five touchdowns and five interceptions. The coldest of those contests was 29 degrees.
“I’m going to see what we can wear for the game,” Tagovailoa said about playing in sub-zero temperatures. “You can’t prepare for a game like that with that kind of weather, so it’ll be new.”
Tagovailoa said he was going to try to play without gloves.
“I’ll just see what it feels like without gloves,” Tagovailoa said. “I just think the whole thing is a mindset.”
In addition to the temperature, winds of 19 mph from the northwest are expected during the game.
“I think it’s just a feel of how everything is, what the ball feels like, what throwing feels like, what holding the ball feels like, if there’s wind, if there’s not wind — you have to take all those things into consideration,” Tagovailoa said. “But we’ll go there, we’ll test it out, and we’ll see what we have to do as far as adjusting or not.”
Tagovailoa is a native of Hawaii, who hadn’t had experience with cold weather, except for a high school all-star game in Seattle, until he came to Alabama to play for the Crimson Tide.
“At first, I thought it was really cool because that was my first time I got to see snow,” Tagovailoa said. “And now everybody’s like, ‘Wait, it snows in Alabama?’ Yeah, it’s crazy. … That was my first time seeing snow. It was super cool.
“But, yeah, like the things that I can remember while it was cold is it was a little different gripping the ball. Your hands aren’t as moist when you’re feeling the ball, so you either have a hand-warmer or something to keep it not dry, if that makes sense.”
The Dolphins and Chiefs will square off at 7 p.m. CST Saturday at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri. Peacock will televise the game.
Tagovailoa will be playing in his first NFL postseason game. He missed the Dolphins’ 34-31 loss to the Buffalo Bills in the first round last year because of a concussion.
“I don’t think I could compare this to anything because it’s all new,” Tagovailoa said. “Everything is all new. This is a different feeling than it was in the national-championship game, different feeling than it was in the SEC Championship Game. I think they all come from new feelings.
“But the way I cope with it is go about my business the way I’ve been going about my business, take care of my job and trust my teammates will do the same with theirs.”
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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.