Can We Just Get to the Regular Season, Please?

 This is not my favorite part of the NFL calendar. The days between the end of the Super Bowl and the first Sunday of the Regular Season are a slog for me.

Sure, it’s fun - thinking about and trying to predict what teams, specifically the Dolphins, are going to do in Free Agency and the Draft. I can very clearly remember sitting in front of my computer during the 2015 Free Agency period, refreshing and refreshing my Google search, reading articles about how Ndamukong Suh was going to join Miami and how he was going to change their franchise prospects.

Which, let’s be real. For half a decade before that, in Madden, I would move Heaven and Earth to get Suh on my defense. Trading draft picks and stacking my roster with all the best players I could find. But those rosters always hit the salary cap by year three, and the little dynasty I’d made myself always blew up.

I’m sure if you’ve been reading these posts, you already sort of know this about me. That’s why I’m skeptical about Free Agency. I feel like it’s a fairly hard and fast rule that you can’t buy Blue Chip talent. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers want to prove me and every other team-building philosopher wrong. And they did - for one season.

We don’t all remember the 2011 Philadelphia Eagles’ so-called “Dream Team”. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2621230-the-dream-team-that-wasnt-a-cautionary-tale-for-free-agency Here’s a little refresher for those who don’t or who want me to site my history.

Football is a complex game. I don’t know or frankly care enough about other sports to make a good comparative argument, here; but in professional basketball, it seems like you can get away with, and even win championships, with teams that have one Superstar talent. Football is not that game. Look at the Green Bay Packers - I heard Mark Schlereth call them the “Dynasty That Never Was” earlier this week because they’ve spent the last 30-some years with Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers at the helm of their offenses, and they have two Super Bowl wins in that time. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think they have three total appearances in those 30 years.

That begs the argument that Free Agents do buy you Super Bowls - because as the NFL-loving public knows, the Green Bay Packers draft and develop their own. To the point that people are talking like Aaron Rodgers would rather do Jeopardy! than continue to lose the NFC Championship game. (Which is frankly silly. If the man wants to host a game show that films during the NFL offseason, why shouldn’t he be allowed, even encouraged, to do both? The answer is because football is a different kind of game. And has become very different from what it was pre-AFL/NFL merger. But this feels like a discussion for another time, so I’m putting it down and moving on.)

As my mind searches for a way to explain the difference in winning in the Regular Season and winning in the Playoffs, I am reminded of a Thomas Jefferson quote - which, as I research it, turns out never came either from the man’s mouth, nor his pen, but that’s fine; that's how history works. Effectively, the quote is, “I am a fan of Luck. I find the harder I work, the more of it I have.”

The Playoffs are, it seems to me, about 60% luck, 40% hard work. Why do I say that? Because of teams like the 2021 49ers or the Chargers of the 2010s: Staying healthy through 16 games - now 17 - as a team, seems to be the greatest challenge a team actually faces. Not so much the other teams on their schedule.

They - we - say Any Given Sunday because, as much as fans and pundits enjoy super teams, dynasties and winners, the parity of the NFL - said like a curse in many mouths - makes it true enough. The 2020 Kansas City Chiefs went 14 - 2. The big complaint about that team, however, week in and week out as fans and pundits and haters predicted their next loss, was that they weren’t burying their opponents. Their games were almost all within 10 points. The Dolphins lost to them by 6, if I remember correctly.

When I was in Pee Wee, there was a team called PAL South. I think PAL stands for Police Athletic League. My Pee Wee career, in my age group, they went undefeated every year. My team played them in the championship when I was in fourth of fifth grade. We lost, naturally.They won on mystique - like the Patriots, like the Chiefs, et cetera. We knew they were good and we would beat ourselves playing them. It happened every year. Twice, the one.

The teams that make it to the Dance, every year, will tell you they were lucky to sustain no season-threatening injuries. The Chiefs will probably tell you they were unlucky that Patrick Mahomes injured his foot, so he wasn’t himself for the Super Bowl.

Hard work and it’s payoff are evident during the Regular Season. You can tell the teams who work the hardest, who come together the closest; because every year the teams that don’t are out of contention by Week 10.

Where is this going?

If it feels like that to me, you have to feel it. 

Rolling around on Twitter this morning was Peter Schrager’s Mock Draft. I don’t have an opinion about it. I would be livid if Miami went offensive line over a pass catcher, but whatever. Schrags hears what Schrags hears. I started writing this because I wanted to caution football fans, but especially Dolphins fans, to continue to be patient. I want to spend the remaining, what, four weeks? Three? quietly optimistic that my team and every team are going to do what I want for them. That every team is going to hit on all of their draft picks, and everyone is going to be fighting for a Playoff spot come Week 13.

That isn’t how things are going to go. Someone with a stacked roster that seems ready to compete for the Dance today is going to get unlucky. If I had to guess right now - Jimmy G gets hurt. That sort of thing. Some head coach is going to completely beans his gameplans too many times. But right now, all we have is reminders that football isn’t being played. The longer it goes, the wilder speculation and talk is going to get about the League. Your Colin Cowherds are going to shit on Tua Tagovailoa, for example. They’re going to continue to argue that Miami should trade him for a known commodity. Soon it’ll be Matt Ryan the fans want Miami to target.

Since all the talking heads (except Cowherd, somehow??) want Ryan out of Atlanta.

I guess all of these hundreds of words today are me trying to work through why I’m patiently impatient for this whole process to work itself out. Thanks for letting me ramble about it, and thanks - again and always - for reading these words. I love this game and want to talk about it, but I’m no journalist. I’m just a guy tapping his thoughts out on a keyboard as he has them. And you’re super cool for joining me on these winding, going-nowhere travels.

Travis Etienne and Javonte Williams have recently come across my HUD, and I’m sure I should be formulating opinions about them and getting my hopes up that Miami will take either one of them or Najee Harris.

I keep reading that they’re all three very good if slightly different - for instance that Williams would make an excellent compliment to Myles Gaskin. But in those blurbs, you also see people saying there’s not a first-round runner in this class. My favorite ESPN personality, and of course the Dolphins writer, Cameron Wolfe, pointed out today he’s had scouts tell him that none of these guys are better than the runner the Colts drafted last year - Jonathan Taylor. (Am I the only person who wants so badly to call him Jonathan Taylor Thomas? No? I’m the only kid who grew up watching Man of the House on repeat until the tape was fucked? Okay, fine.)

But I was never impressed with Jonathan Taylor. Sure, you see lots of people who know what they’re talking about - who certainly know more than I do (here’s looking at you Bryan Baldinger) - who love the guy. But I never saw anything that particularly impressed me last year. He looked like a running back.

I’m not arguing that I think that Najee Harris is a phenom who’s going to break all the records. I genuinely don’t know. I know that no one in college wanted to tackle him. And that is a factor in Derrick Henry’s success, it was a factor in Eddie George’s success - it’s a factor with all those plus-6-foot runners. Their knees are also a major factor in their longevity.

I’m going to finish this now by saying one last thing: I want Miami to draft offense in the first round. I want them to go hard after two skill positions. I want them to target those guys too high on their board if they have to. I want, most of all and specifically, for them to get the guy they want and for him to know he’s the guy they wanted. No letting someone fall to them. The division is not wide open. But the Bills are not an indestructible team.

It takes no talent, right? It takes a lot of luck and a lot more hard work. The front office has proven to me that they’re putting in that work. The Miami Dolphins are quickly becoming my favorite team again and my favorite part of the NFL, not just because I was born into it - naturally my father is a fan and has been since the 70s - but because they’re starting to act the way I think about the game.

And that’s just nice.

Anyway, I think I’m done for today. Thanks for following along. (I know I said this part already.) I’m going to be making more of an effort to do this every day, even if I don’t exactly have anything new or inspirational to say. Kind of like today, I guess. Eventually I’m going to have to share my thoughts on Deshaun Watson. I’m not ready, I don’t think. But I also worry that if I wait too long and my private thoughts are right… then I’m not doing this blogging thing correctly.

We’ll see.

Thanks again!