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Things have been relatively quiet on the Tua Tagovailoa front over the past few months, all things considered. Sure, there has been more than enough speculation surrounding the former Alabama star given his injury history, but for a player of his status that’s set to be a Top 5 pick in the upcoming NFL Draft, there hasn’t been too much noise.
It turns out that has a lot to do with Trent Dilfer, who recently revealed that he’s been heavily involved during Tagovailoa’s rehab and training process. The former Super Bowl-winning quarterback wanting everything to be a secret and he accomplished that goal.
Galu, Tagovailoa’s father, had to ask Dilfer a few times before he finally accepted to help him prepare for the NFL Draft. According to the Washington Post, Dilfer had one condition and that was the entire training process would be veiled in secrecy. He even drew inspiration from Rocky IV and the isolated training regimen seen in the movie.
“[Rocky] went to the Ukraine and he gets away from everything to build himself up to fight Drago,” Dilfer says he told Tua. “I don’t think you know what you are asking for in coming here, but we are going to literally rebuild you.”
Dilfer is the head football coach at Lipscomb Academy, a small Christian high school in Nashville. Tagovailoa, his father, mother, and personal trainer arrived in Music City in mid-January and the secret camp got underway. Tagovailoa got his work done on Lipscomb’s campus, but had to be stealthy not allowing any students or outside eyes notice him.
Tagovailoa would drive from his apartment near downtown early in the morning, long before Lipscomb’s students arrived, and study in Dilfer’s office inside the field house, only leaving twice a day: to work out with Richesson and Ligsay in the weight room located across the driveway, and to do football work with Dilfer in the field house. Then it was back to Dilfer’s office until it was time to return home to the apartment at night. Dilfer even brought in a local chef, David Fults, to make all of Tagovailoa’s meals, turning an adjacent storage closet into a temporary kitchen.
“If you put a GPS on Tua, you would see it was straight from his apartment to Trent’s office to the weight room,” says a person with direct knowledge of Tagovailoa’s training.
Dilfer said that the rehab process for Tagovailoa was torture featuring 2 & 1/2 hours in the weight room in the morning and then another 2 & 1/2 hours some time in the afternoon.
Imagine being a Lipscomb Academy student seeing this news and realizing that Tagovailoa has been sneaking around your campus for months rehabbing as he gets set to hear his name called at the NFL Draft.