Dear Dolphins Fans - A Post Script to Sundays Loss

 

Does the Replace Brian Flores with Joe Brady or Brian Daboll talk smack anyone else of subtle racism?

Dolphins should be changing their long-term plans. Should have changed them this offseason. I think they did. And Flores needs to have had a conversation with Ross about the plan moving forward. If I'm Flores, I'm preparing my resignation letter for the end of the season. If I'm right about this team, Ross has completely undermined him with the roster.

This is Mike Shanahan/RGIII. It's playing out almost exactly the same way, too. By Year Three the relationship was completely ruined because Dan Snyder was in RGIII's ear and he didn't have to take Shanahan's coaching. So as soon as there was a rift in their relationship, Shanahan was out and RGIII was kept and the Washington football team subsequently became the Football Team. My point isn't so much that it's RGIII's fault, the precipitous fall from the success of his rookie season to being Lamar Jackson's backup, as it is that Dan Snyder got in the way of something special.

It's no coincidence that Alfred Morris was Just A Guy outside of Shanahan and his system. Even Jay Gruden couldn't do anything with him. And he made Kirk Cousins look like a starting quarterback for half a decade. We remember Terrell Davis now as a superstar and Hall of Famer – and for good reason, I'm not here to undermine the dude. But he only played for six seasons. He was a sixth round pick – by one Mike Shanahan.

Mikey S didn't make Terrell Davis what Terrell Davis became. TD did. What Shanahan did was identify that he could and put him in position to succeed. And succeed they did. Remember – Elway was considered washed up before TD got there.

We've watched Kyle Shanahan do the same thing everywhere he's been – identify difference-maker runners and put them in position to succeed.

Actually, we say that. But are Trey Sermon and Elijah Mitchell doing anything interesting this season? Everything is so hard for the 49ers right now. There really is something to say for loyalty to a veteran, Kyle, Matt Nagy, but you also have to temper expectations.

Actually, let's frame that conversation, because I think it's a good one, with the Dolphins. Because I think that Nagy and Shanahan are trying to make the mistake that might actually get Brian Flores fired at the end of this season. If, like I said earlier, he doesn't pull an Adam Gase and resign. Because, remember, Gase resigned because the owner didn't want to Win Now. So he went to the Jets where they always think they're ready to Win Now – even when their owner lives in Ireland.

What a fuckin joke Woody Johnson is. And his brother, Christopher.

But I'm biased: I think all billionaires are assholes, no matter what team they own – by “virtue” of being a billionaire at all.

Coaches get it in their heads that all they need is an experienced quarterback and they can do the rest with their scheme and the force of their personalities. You have to have that in your head to apply for a head coaching gig.

It's like the hype piece they did for Sean McVay on Thursday night: playing him up as obsessed, asking the question, what would you do if you could do it your way. That's what it's like to be a Head Coach. That's what you have to have in order to be great at anything.

I'm straying from my subject matter, but do you think Star Wars got made without Lucas obsessing over how he would do it if he had the chance to do it his way? Hell, this blog is my very own response to my obsession with how I would write about sports if I had the chance to do it my way. And I do. So I am. Hell, you could even say the raison d'etre of this blog is something like My friend, I'll make it clear. I'll state my case, of which I'm certain. I'll do it, I'll do it my way.

Why did I just get Sinatra stuck in my own head? God, I really am becoming a football writer. Next I'll be listening to The Boss – I literally don't even know his real name, that's how few of his songs I've listened to... Bruce Springstein.

I've gone so far astray.

Adam Gase resigned because Ross and Grier wanted to tank. They knew that come 2020 and 2021 they would be able to snag one of the premier quarterbacks which were set to come out in those drafts. You already know who they are. If you're a Dolphins fan, you remember this acutely. Or you should. It was only three seasons ago.

The plan was to draft one in both classes if necessary. Arizona had already proved the analytics right, that you take back to back Oness and let them compete and take the better of the two with Kyler Murray and Josh Rosen. And it's going to make Steve Keim a very comfortable man who is employed for as long as he likes, wherever he likes.

That plan went awry.

And I'm here to tell you I know who panicked.

The owner. Stephen Ross, billionaire though he is, is a real estate developer. Real estate developers are not men known for their patience. For their long-term planning. You scoop up real estate, you develop it for what's profitable now, and you either sell it for major profits or you rent it for space. This is not a difficult way to generate wealth. It's not even especially risky. Donald Trump has made how many fortunes this way? All you need is the up-front capital and patient investors. You don't have to be patient. In fact, looking proactive and impatient is how you get shit done.

That's not how the NFL works.

I've worked for a fair share of owners in startup businesses. I don't want to get into it, but owners are the same in every industry. When you're working directly with an owner, you have to sell them on what you're doing constantly.

Ross bought a defensive coach because when you're tanking, you don't look so bad when you have a good defense. The plan was to shift to the offense-heavy systems of teams like the Rams - because every owner wants what Stan Kroenke has in LA: a shutdown defense and an offense that can bury teams. What the Cardinals now seem to actually have. Miami's receiver room screams of a GM and head coach trying to sell a Rams-style roster to their owner. Except the personnel aren't Robert Woods and Cooper Kupp and Matthew Stafford.

Every owner that Stephen Ross reminds me of has a perennially average team. Sometimes they spike. Usually they stay around .500. Jerry Jones. Jed York. Dan Snyder. (Bigotries and all?) Dean Spanos. Shad Khan. Jim Irsay. Jimmy Haslam. ...Do I really need to go around to every team and point out their billionaire real estate tycoon and how the way he handles his team like a toy is why it plays poorly?

It reminds me of the moment you're first introduced to the Mayor of the first town in the game The Outer Worlds. He's condescending to a factory engineer who is trying to explain to him why the machines the town is responsible for aren't working, and she finally says something to the effect of, “Sir, the machines can't process and pack fish if we don't have fish to put in them.”

And he responds with something like, “Well, can't you put just anything in it and pack that?”

The answer is obviously no.

You can't just put any old player on the field and expect them to became ATGs (All-Time Greats) because they play for the team you own. Fan owners just never work out.

Think of all the years that Jerry Jones was a fan of his team first. All those years of, as Colin Cowherd says it best, handing great money to good players, and what has the result been? The only time his teams have been consistently successful was when he was in near constant conflict with Jimmy Johnson over management of the roster. A conflict which resulted in Jimmy leaving and the Cowboys becoming what we see before us.

Is Brian Flores Wade Phillips? God, I hope not.

Jerry Jones almost destroyed that man's career. And the fans almost killed his spirit.

I'm watching too many former Miami defensive gurus find success around the League right now. Lou Anarumo in Cincinnati, Vance Joseph in Arizona, Todd Bowles in Tampa Bay – I'm sure there are more, but three really is too many. As fans, we have to hold on to one of these guys. Todd Bowles, for instance. As soon as Miami let him go, the Jets snatched him up and found a modicum of success under him. But really, it's been since then, when Bruce Arians grabbed him up from the Jets and brought him to Arizona that it's been, like, why didn't Miami just let this guy develop?

Sometimes it just takes time to develop. Now, in all three of these dudes' cases, I don't think they'd make excellent Head Coaches. And the Head Coaches they worked for did burn out. So how do they fit in the conversation a la Brian Flores and his career moving forward?

I think Brian Flores has shown that he is an excellent coach. That, during two seasons where he was meant to lose, he found ways to keep his teams competitive. I like to listen to Flo talk, but Flo is part of the Bill Belichick tree – he has figured out that his media outlets and his fanbase are idiots, and has stopped trying to teach them football. See, everyone is making a big deal about Brandon Staley and his pressers right now. But the way he's talking to his media is... not what people think.

I'm getting off topic, but fuck it, I've been off-topic since I started this thing – with no topic in mind, only vague notions of windmills I need to tilt at after a long Sunday of football.

Staley is just as frustrated as all the coaches with the interview and press release questions he's receiving. Coaches aren't politicians and celebrities: They don't get the questions screened beforehand so they can practice what they're going to say. When Staley started breaking down how the run game affects the pass game affects the defense, he wasn't doing it because he just loves talking about football. He did it because he was pissed off with his fanbase's ignorance.

Fans want to throw it every down. They want to be the Chiefs. But look at the Chiefs. The Bills made them look silly, too, didn't they?

I love the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes. I genuinely do. Watching them lose that Super Bowl and watching the start of this season have been like a mild Indian Sunburn on my arm. Please stop twisting my skin in your hands – are you psychopath? But the defense is a problem. The horizontal passing game to make up for the lack of consistent run game – these are problems that Andy Reid is going to have to solve.

When your defense can't get a stop, it doesn't matter how good your offense is. You can't overcome turnovers.

Sigh.

I keep saying it. The Dolphins aren't ready to compete for the Division. But what does that mean? Does that mean they shouldn't be expected to compete for a Wild Card? No. Of course not.

I know what it is. Where my disconnect with the team – and especially with the fans – is.

The Dolphins of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, the Shula Dolphins – the fans of those teams thought they were in the conversation with the greatest teams of all time – the Steelers of the 70s, the 49ers of the 80s, and the Cowboys of the 90s. They got used to being in the Playoff conversation. They got used to being that team that everyone in the AFC kind of cringed to think about playing.

The last 20 years have been hard for Dolphins fans.

They weren't winning enough, and my father didn't watch them on television enough, after the starts of the 00s, for me to be paying attention in high school. But, since 2008, I've been following them closely enough to write about them – to remember who the quarterbacks were for the 2009 season, when Good Morning Football weren't even all within the same decade, for example. (Chads Henne and Pennington, btw.)

Dolphins media, especially the professional fans, think that they can be hard on the team because they are right to have high expectations. They think this franchise is one of the greats. That it stands head and shoulders with the Steelers, the Cowboys, the Niners. But it doesn't. It doesn't stand on the podium as a bronze-medal Super Bowl franchise. It's been so long, no one remembers the 70s Super Bowls. Every time an undefeated team loses, they make fun of Mercury Morris and Co toasting their undefeated season.

Literally modern football people – players and pundits alike – think the undefeated season was a fluke. They joke about Bob Griese's status as a Hall of Famer. No one remembers Mercury Morris or Larry Czonka or Nat Moore or Nick Buoniconti or Paul Warfield or Jimmy Langer outside of Dolphins fans. And even then, the oldest of them – or the nerdiest.

The Dolphins aren't in the conversation as being among the very most storied of franchises – they're in the conversation as teams who belong shut in the cellar and forgotten forever. Teams like the Browns, like the Chargers, the Chiefs, the Buccaneers....

As I'm making that list of cellar-dwelling teams, I realize that most of the perennially terrible teams of the past two decades aren't anymore. What do they have? The Buccaneers have a former Dolphins interim head coach at DC. The Chiefs and the Browns have innovating offensive coaches and young quarterbacks. The Chargers have an innovative defensive coach and a gangster quarterback.

But really what they have is front offices with a plan and ownership willing to let them play it out.

The Chargers' Dean Spanos is nothing if not patient. I feel like the last five coaches he's hired and fired were obviously not the guy at the end of Year 1. But by God, he gave them every chance possible to keep their jobs.

I forgot to mention the Bills – Josh Allen and Sean McDermott.

Miami really belongs in the conversation with the Jaguars and the Jets and the Falcons and the Colts and the Texans and the Giants – but it's the Lions I want to circle with a red marker.

My dad was a Lions fan too. I inherited the Dolphins fandom from him. For the Lions I have only mild interest. Not enough to obsess over what's wrong up there: it seems pretty clear that it's ownership.

Miami are one of the very worst teams in the League. If it weren't for the Bills and the Jets and the AFC in general being bad, Miami should be a sub-.500 franchise over the last 20 years.

Actually—

It really is remarkable how up until Flores' first season Miami had exactly a .500 record since Marino left.

The dearth of blue chip talent in this team's history really is concerning.

Jason Taylor is the last truly great player I've seen suit up for this team.

What is that? Is it the city? Is it the distractions? Is it being drafted by Miami and being told you're part of this Undefeated Super Bowl Winning Legacy and just assuming you're going to contribute to that? Is it coaches woefully unprepared for what they've gotten themselves into?

I genuinely don't understand.

I've been working on a thesis that every team has a Team Gonna Team – a thing that they do or that happens to them every season regardless of who own the team or who is coaching or who is playing. And it seems that the Dolphins are just always going to be mediocre.

This is too many coaches in a row now to be coincidence. After two years, when the training wheels are supposed to be taken off and the team is supposed to become an extension of the coach and everything is supposed to look how it's going to look going forward, the Dolphins fall apart.

Flores had them working on Fundamentals during the week in preparation for Tampa Bay.

Fundamentals are for Preseason. If you're working fundamentals in the regular season, that means you aren't working on the advanced stuff. You aren't working third down. You aren't working fourth down. You aren't working 2-minute.

I know these coaches are extremely organized. But every second you spend on one thing is a second you're not spending on another. And if you're working fundamentals in October, you aren't getting better.

I play a little music.

Fundamentals are working on your scales. They're working on technique, on the very first things you learn how to do when you pick up an instrument. What it is not is practicing songs. And if you go out on stage and all you play is the most fundamentally sound scales that have ever been played, you will be booed off stage.

If it's Week 5 and you're working fundamentals, your team have betrayed you as a coach. They've let you down. They aren't where they're supposed to be.

If you're a school teacher and your students aren't learning their material at the pace they have to in order to be competitive with the classes around you, is it your fault or theirs? If every time you turn around they're practicing secret handshakes instead of taking their studies seriously, is that on you – or is that on them?

I want to know, because when these players are selected in the draft process, teams only know what they can glean from the interview process. And I can tell you right now, as a person who has been on both sides of way too many job interviews – the interview process in the NFL is total bullshit.

And then you've got the question of the fan-owner. How are those interviews going when Ross is in the room? And how does the hiring orientation go when Ross is your owner? I don't know. But I've heard enough stories coming out of enough poisoned locker rooms to know that the owner is always at fault. It was Jeffrie Lurie's choice to pull Jalen Hurts Week 17 last year, for instance.

The whole story I refused to get interested in last week between Tom Brady and Bill Belichick – which one of them deserves more credit? You know who deserves the credit? Robert Kraft, for figuring a way to keep these two extremely different and extremely competitive men married for so long.

This is one of the longest pieces I've ever written for the Rabbit Hole, and I could keep going. This is so formless, though, I really feel like I should have given myself topics.

I've wandered from topic to topic pretty gratuitously, haven't I?

Eh, oh well. I kind of imagine this like I'm sitting in front of a microphone with a radio show. I can say whatever I like, and no one is feeding me anything, so what the hell. Just go where I go and if I miss something, I'll come back and get it later.

I haven't buried the lead – that's where the story you should start with gets forgotten until deep into the program. But I have completely forgotten to circle back around to what I opened today's piece with:

Is the Joe Brady/Brian Daboll for HC noise I'm hearing subtly racist?

I think it is.

Eric Bieniemy is one of the best football coaches in the League. He's proven he can do it year in and year out with Mahomes. Matt Nagy didn't have nearly as much success as Bieniemy has.

But Dolphins fans want some guy named Joe Brady? Who the fu.... The OC of the Panthers? Lolwut?

I Googled his name and the first result is some asshole named Todd Fuhrman tweeting that the Panthers should fire Zac Taylor and replace him with Joe Brady.

Yeah. It's racist.

Are we fucking kidding right now? What the fuck has Joe Brady done in the NFL?

I'm calling you out right now: if you're trying to replace Flores with this dickhead, you're a racist. It has absolutely nothing to do with Flo's performance and everything to do with his skin color. And your hatred of Grier – yeah, that's pretty plainly racism, too. That's been racism for years. It was racism when you said he only got the job because of the Rooney Rule and it continues to be racism that you want to replace him with a TBD white guy.

Jon Gruden's comments in 2011 have met a pretty tepid response from the League. But they perfectly incapsulate how non-whites are thought of in the League.

Fans are saying literally anyone would be better – because Michael Lombardi, a guy who is no longer a GM in the League because he was completely disgraced with his return to the Browns in 2012 doesn't like Grier. Fuck that. That guy only found success with Bill Belichick – that's concerning. Cus it sounds like Belichick found success with that guy.

Anyway, I'm starting to reconcile some of my frustration with this season. I'm disappointed in this Dolphins team, but really I'm just fed up with Dolphins fans. They're cannibals – and with no other teams' fans to feast on because their team sucks, they're feasting on one another.

It's gross. I don't want to be a part of it.

I tweeted out last night, and I ask again – how am I, a person who has one foot out the door and has been filmed publicly grinding on the Browns and Bengals after Dolphins losses, the voice of reason to Dolphins fans? I don't know. But I don't know that I enjoy it.

Actually, I do enjoy it. What I don't enjoy is trying to be reasonable with professional fans.

Just have to find my audience. Which means I just have to keep doing these.

I feel like I should apologize, now that I've reached the end of this piece. This is extremely disorganized. That isn't the goal. I apparently have a lot of thoughts and don't feel like organizing them. I'll be back to all of these topics. Thanks for reading this – I hope you liked it. There's more to come, today. I just needed to get this out to get started.

I'll talk at you soon.