MIAMI GARDENS — If you only became familiar with new Miami Dolphins starting quarterback Quinn Ewers when he was drafted in late April or when he starred in college at Texas, you might not know he once had a different look.
The NFL rookie, now clean-cut, used to rock a mullet back when he was a ballyhooed recruit out of Southlake Carroll High in Texas. The long hair was a trademark as he rose to prominence as a five-star prospect and the nation’s No. 1 recruit in 2021 and, in a way, was a symbol of his personality.
“A great quality of Quinn, Quinn is very comfortable in his own skin,” Ewers’ high school coach, Riley Dodge, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in a phone interview. “I think that’s something that you got to have as a quarterback.”
It’s a trait that was firmly in Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel’s mind when he made the move this past week to bench Tua Tagovailoa in favor of Ewers, who makes his first NFL start Sunday when the Dolphins (6-8) host the Cincinnati Bengals (4-10) in a 1 p.m. kickoff at Hard Rock Stadium.
“Quinn has a natural disposition of confidence, not cockiness, but confidence,” McDaniel said Wednesday after news of the decision leaked. “The team needs — and I’m looking for — conviction in quarterback play.”
“It’s a dream come true for me,” Ewers said. “I’ve always wanted to have the opportunity to play in the NFL, and for that to be coming is truly a blessing and I’m thankful for the opportunity. I’m just happy.”
Dodge says Ewers’ mullet started growing his sophomore year and it continued through his junior year, which would turn out to be his last in high school, as he reclassified to get to college a year early.
“That thing got nasty,” Dodge said. “Like the Joe Dirt mullet. It was full-on.”
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On top of that, Southlake Carroll has a tradition where players bleach their hair come playoff time. So, when the postseason rolled around, Ewers had a bleached blonde mullet.
“They came together to make a … monster,” Dodge said.
When Ewers spoke at a new conference Wednesday afternoon after his first walkthrough taking starter reps in practice, he mentioned overcoming obstacles at every level of his career. As that top-ranked recruit in high school, he suffered a core injury that had him miss significant time before that postseason. He could’ve protected his body and his standing as a prospect, but he went back out there for his team.
“He was the No. 1 prospect in the country, five-star. Probably, selfishly, the human nature in people tell them, ‘You don’t have to do that,’ but he did,” said Dodge of Ewers, who was making a name for himself locally as early as sixth grade in youth football and was already receiving college offers as an eighth-grader.
“People ask me all the time, ‘What makes him special?’ No. 1, as a quarterback, you got to be a tough dude physically and mentally, and he’s got all that.”
Ewers’ college career, in what should’ve been his high school senior season, started at Ohio State, when current Houston Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud was behind center for the Buckeyes. He never threw a pass for OSU that one season behind Stroud and Kyle McCord.
“There’s not many seniors in high school that are ready to be freshmen (in college), especially at the quarterback position at Ohio State,” Dodge said. “I know he learned a lot on and off the field that year. I think it was a blessing in disguise.”
Ewers found himself again as he transferred to Texas, and that was also the end of his mullet. After Dodge’s efforts to get him to cut it through his season at Ohio State, it was a conversation between Dodge and Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian at a dinner function, where they agreed he had to do without it as the face of the program, that did the trick.
“Literally, the following day, he FaceTimes me and he had chopped it off,” Dodge said.
Under Sarkisian at Texas, Ewers threw for 9,128 yards and 68 touchdowns. He got the Longhorns to the College Football Playoff semifinal, falling to eventual national champion — yep — Ohio State.
But before he had Texas on the verge of the title game and staved off competition from Arch Manning coming in, Ewers helped build Texas back up from the 5-7 season the proud football program it had in 2021.
Early in the 2022 season, the Longhorns had No. 1 Alabama on the ropes in a 1-point loss. By the next season, Ewers led them into Tuscaloosa for an upset of Alabama.
“That’s probably the game people want to talk about when you talk about Quinn,” Dodge said, as that sparked Texas to eventually reach the four-team playoff that season. “The type of game he had, but also, the things that I look at knowing the kid, seeing how he interacts with people on the sideline and just the intangibles were really unleashed.”
The draft was difficult for Ewers. He dropped all the way to the seventh round, but with the Dolphins, he was immersed into an offense similar to the one he ran in college.
Ewers has been the third-string emergency quarterback in all but one of the Dolphins’ first 14 games. The one time he was elevated as the backup, he got thrown into the end of a blowout loss in Cleveland to the Browns, a situation he acknowledged was “frantic” when he went in.
Dolphins players and coaches have expressed confidence and belief in the youngster before he starts against the Bengals. Cincinnati has the No. 28 pass defense, and Miami may be able to lean on its run game to aid Ewers against the Bengals’ league-worst run defense.
“He’s just going to be a distributor. He’s going to be the point guard,” Dodge said. “He does that better than anybody. There’s going to be highs and lows in the ball game, but I expect him to go through it with no fear of failure and really just rip it.”
