After a concussion ended his 2022 NFL season, quarterback Tua Tagovailoa returned to team drills on Tuesday as the Miami Dolphins opened Phase 3 of their offseason program.

In 2022, Tagovailoa missed five games and more than half of another because of concussions – one sustained on Sept. 29 in a 27-15 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals and the other on Dec. 25 in a 26-20 loss to the Green Bay Packers.

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Tagovailoa has not played since the second concussion as he sat out the final two regular-season games and a playoff contest.

Miami coach Mike McDaniel said on Tuesday the former Alabama All-American had worked hard to put last season’s trouble behind him, including tackling jiu jitsu to help him learn to fall more safely.

“I’ve seen a guy that’s followed through with his words as well as any young man that I’ve come across in my career,” McDaniel said. “Controlling the controllable is something that I would epitomize his offseason with. You want to talk about going above and beyond — training, martial arts — so much so that he knew the training before he knew what it was called. I think he was calling it judo. Jiu jitsu is what he was doing. But that in terms of helping him progress in his career has been phenomenal. The work that he’s done this offseason, it was so obviously beneficial that we’ve incorporated it into some of our drill work that we’ll do with the quarterbacks.”

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Tagovailoa has not undertaken a normal jiu jitsu course, but one tailored for the type of hits he takes as a passer.

“It’s a lot of strategic falling that is patterned after things that happened to our quarterbacks during the season,” McDaniel said, “so kind of recreating those things, because the master of jiu jitsu had to study some game tape to understand how he was falling, where the impact points were and what we could do to help correct it. By and large, you find out that core strength is very much important when you’re talking about the transfer of energy of the human body going to the ground, and different things that you can do to minimize that are strategic, but then strengthening of the core so that when you’re going to the ground, the top of your torso isn’t just a leverage whipping device.”

After diving into Tagovailoa’s offseason work, McDaniel wondered why the approach wasn’t a regular part of quarterback training.

“It makes you think, hey, why haven’t we detailed this before?” McDaniel said. “Because when you think about it, you have so much coaching that goes into where you stand in the huddle, how you deliver the play call, your pre-snap process and how you diagnose things into the play. You’re coaching all this stuff, and then you have a throw and an impending hit, and then we just stop talking. That’s where my training was as a coach up until this point.

“So training, follow-through and how to protect yourself while getting hit so that you can continue to play is something that’s applicable for everyone. They haven’t trained me how to do the tutorial. I think that’s when it will really start to take shape because I’ll just be knocking individuals over that are much bigger than me. But Season 1, let’s leave it to the experts and let somebody else beat him up a little bit, but it’s been very positive in terms of controlling what we can control and how to go along the process of injury prevention as best we can.”

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Even with Tagovailoa missing time last season, the Dolphins finished sixth among the NFL’s 32 teams in points in McDaniel’s first season after Miami ranked No. 25 in 2021.

Tagovailoa completed 259-of-400 passes for 3,548 yards with 25 touchdowns and eight interceptions last season. He had the NFL’s top passing-efficiency rating at 105.5 in 2022.

“It was kind of a critical offseason for me,” McDaniel said. “I didn’t look at our offense, and say, ‘Wow, we did all this stuff good.’ I saw all the stuff that we could improve upon. Now the stuff that the players and coaches did last year, you shouldn’t minimize that because there was substantial growth, to the tune of improving – quick math – 25 spots. And in your league-wide ranking, that should never be minimized.

“But that’s not where we’re trying to go, so the coaching staff was ready for the players to get back and, realistically, players love direction. ‘We need to be better’ only goes so far, so identifying critical things in our game. An easy one was pre-snap penalties. We were the worst at that, so got a lot of ways to improve there. …

“And all I’ve seen is an offense, I’ve seen a team that isn’t satisfied with where they’re at. They see 2023 is an opportunity to really move past where we were last year. And that’s the way they’ve approached it. From route running to how we block people to everything in between, the consistency of our fundamentals and detail has been huge, and we’ve had as a result, I mean, the growth that we made in Phase 1 and Phase 2, relative to last year, is astronomical.”

In Phase 3 of the offseason program, teams are allowed to conduct 10 days of organized team practice activity, often referred to as OTAs. No live contact is permitted, but teams can expand their workouts to include 7-on-7, 9-on-7 and 11-on-11 drills. A three-day mandatory minicamp also can be held during this period.

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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.