This game is everything for the Miami Dolphins, too
They're fun. They score in bunches. But Mike McDaniel knows it's time to change the perception of his team.
Bad is only turning to worse. First, the Miami Dolphins were bludgeoned by the Baltimore Ravens. The footage was ghastly. Lamar Jackson sealed up his second MVP award with ease. Before the 56-19 humiliation was complete there was also crushing injury to insult. With all of 3 minutes and 5 seconds of garbage time remaining, the team’s best defensive player tore his ACL.
Terrifying screams from Bradley Chubb were both immediate and audible on the CBS broadcast.
Teammates were distraught. Head coach Mike McDaniel leaned in to console a tearful Chubb on the cart.
This, of course, followed cornerback Xavien Howard injuring his foot. Which followed Jaelan Phillips tearing his Achilles a few weeks back. And right when the Dolphins stopped seeing stars, right when Mickey Goldmill patched up their wounds in the corner of the ring, less than an hour after McDaniel’s uplifting press conference, more horrific news broke on Wednesday. The home of the team’s best player was on fire. Aerial footage captured the stunned Tyreek Hill arriving to witness the flames.
Many coaches for many teams contrive adversity. They hunt for narratives that do not exist.
This is real adversity. Here we go again dread must be palpable in South Florida.
Last year, the Dolphins’ electric season ran out of gas by January. Tua Tagovailoa’s concussions did not help. Down to third-stringer Skylar Thompson by the wild-card round, they lost a tight one to the Buffalo Bills. This year’s crew appears to be in danger of fading again. The team with more points (482) and more yards (6,547) than anyone in the NFL has clinched a playoff berth but they’re staggering. We examined this moment in time for the Bills earlier this week. It’s as true now as it’s always been for Sean McDermott’s crew. To make the playoffs, to reach the Super Bowl, they’ll need their Hulk quarterback to smash. Josh must be Josh. Maybe they’ve manually molded an “identity” around the concept of running the ball, forcing turnovers, winning ugly but such math only takes a team so far.
This isn’t only a man-in-the-mirror moment for the Bills, either.
McDaniel is about to coach his biggest game as the Dolphins’ head man.
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There are the obvious playoff implications. Win the AFC East and the Dolphins lock up the No. 2 seed. The Dolphins theoretically host two home games before a potential rematch with those Ravens. Lose and they’re the No. 6 seed limping into Arrowhead Stadium to play Patrick Mahomes and the defending Super Bowl champions.
This is bigger than seeding, too. Facing a team that has owned them, the Dolphins have an opportunity to rewrite a narrative.
When it’s time to hire a new coach, nearly every team swings the pendulum the opposite direction in terms of style, personality, scheme. Whereas the Bills ditched Rex Ryan’s circus for Sean McDermott’s discipline, the Dolphins replaced Brian Flores — viewed by many players as cruel, particularly toward the QB — with McDaniel, with a coach unlike anyone in the NFL. He doesn’t look or sound or lead like anyone else. Somehow, McDaniel got Tua Tagovailoa to truly believe in himself again. (As chronicled.)
In a profession teeming with egos, Mike McDaniel is the unicorn. The smartest man in every room who never acts like it. He values relationships with players. He’s also scheming up plays nobody’s seen before, ziggin’ and zaggin’ 4.3 speed across every square inch of the field.
Yet, this is also true: Whichever type of coach you are — micromanaging overthinker or tyrant or X ‘n O savant or Zen-like philosophizer — you’ve got to get your team ready to win a game like this one. We know the Miami Dolphins have style. Now, the substance of the Dolphins will be revealed at 8:20 p.m. (EST) this Sunday. Ahead of last week’s game, the Ravens essentially called the Dolphins soft… and then backed it up. Miami was punked.
The Bills are an exceptionally healthy team right now. Their injury report is practically nonexistent. They’ve also beaten Miami in 10 of their last 11 meetings, including a 48-20 win in Week 4. The Dolphins will be without Chubb, Phillips, Howard. Both wide receiver Jaylen Waddle and running back Raheem Mostert missed last week’s loss and Waddle is up in the air for Sunday.
So despite a better record, despite playing at home, the Dolphins are three-point dogs.
Pride is on the line.
It’s on the Dolphins to prove they’re tough enough. Mentally and physically.
Spend 25 minutes watching a Mike McDaniel press conference. It’s worth it. He does not view such sessions as an obligation. Nor does he insult viewers by filibustering through answers with word salads doused in cliches. His answers are honest, informative. On Wednesday, he began by explaining how the team’s effort in practice has changed since its drubbing to the Bills back on Oct. 1. There’s been more “focused deliberate intent.”
McDaniel knows it is human nature for anyone to treat hundreds of practices as anything but a game.
“Because it’s practice,” he said. “However, if you get yourself as close to that mindset of the game — in practice — you are getting more reps at how to act and react in a game. So, I think from a team-wide perspective, it wasn’t that a bunch of people were telling me, ‘I got it.’ It was, I see better than I hear. There was more communication, more game-like attention to detail. All the way to the little things of how you break the huddle, how you strain within the play. You’re as good in the game as you’re able to execute your assignments in practice. I think guys have started to understand what that really means. How you can use practice instead of letting practice use you.”
One year ago, the football career of Tua Tagovailoa was in peril. He suffered two concussions and a suspected third. Ex-NFL QB Kevin Kolb expressed deep concern for Tagovailoa, after detailing the dark twists and turns of his own four concussions. Not to mention all of the other injuries that’ve dogged Tagovailoa since Alabama: ankle, dislocated hip, thumb, fractured ribs, middle finger, etc. Starting all 17 games in a season is no small feat. McDaniel pointed to the offseason jiu jitsu training, the fact that Tagovailoa devoted “hours of his life” to fixing this aspect of his game.
He wanted to quit banging his head on the ground and tried taking matters into his own hands best he could.
“Not everyone’s doing that,” McDaniel said. “Not everyone would do that.”
Too often in pro sports, we hear coaches and players alike lampoon the media for “narratives” and “hit pieces,” all of which is easily digestible for a hungry fan base. The best players know when to take ownership. That’s where this press conference turned quite interesting. McDaniel drew this distinction.
A lot was said about Tagovailoa all last offseason, about how crazy the Dolphins would be to pay such a brittle quarterback. Tagovailoa wanted to keep playing football. It’s a free country, after all. Dismissing all criticism, he knew, would’ve only hurt his own own career. McDaniel is big on positivity — hence the 700 clips he played for the QB upon getting hired — but true growth also requires being honest with yourself.
“I think he’s learned in a much better manner you don’t need to be mad at any sort of narrative,” McDaniel said. “You have to understand it. Should you be entitled for this, that or the other? The fact of the matter is, he hadn’t stayed healthy for a whole season. So what he did was he tried to take control of everything that he could control, and made that a goal. That’s a big deal to me when people are winning in that sense. Where you’re taking on — taking head-on — something that you can’t control and doing your best to control all things. Being at peace with what it is. And ‘if I want people to say that I have the ability to stay healthy, then I need to do everything in my power to try to do that.’ … You have to decide what is said or how you’re perceived. You have to decide if you’re OK with that. And if you’re not, are you going to blame people for saying that? Or are you going to do something about it?”
We see the lazy reaction far too often. It’s much easier to claim everyone else is dead wrong in the face of criticism, to cry “smear attack” and then refuse to change over the next five years.
McDaniel’s message is phenomenal advice for us all.
McDaniel, without question, knows this same logic now applies to his entire team.
The national airwaves are… loud. Very loud. The loudest of them all, Stephen A. Smith, once had “no doubt” the Dolphins would win the AFC East. But now? Stephen A has “lost all faith and all respect” in the team. He added: “I’m so disgusted in the Miami Dolphins they make me sick.” He’s not alone. Consume any sports media, and that’s the general consensus. Talking heads look like they want to puke. Any goodwill McDaniel’s squad seemed to earn with a hard-fought win over the Dallas Cowboys on Christmas Eve evaporated in Baltimore on New Year’s Eve.
Lamenting injuries is both a waste of time and bad for any team’s psyche.
It’s on the Miami Dolphins to change how they are perceived.
McDaniels believes. He sees a roster full of players like Tagovailoa who’ve heard “you can’t.” He points to the offensive line, fullback Alec Ingold and running back Raheem Mostert, whom I sat down with a few years back for this feature at Bleacher Report. Adversity? As a kid, he accidentally shot off part of his toe. The man he identifies as “Dad” (not his biological father) later shot his own son (Mostert’s half-brother) four times. Mostert stopped talking to his mother and, at that point, hadn’t heard from the father who abandoned him when he was born. Nor did he want to. Of course this vagabond running back could handle getting cut by six different teams. He keeps a list of those teams on the Notes app in his phone.
On defense, they’ll need defensive tackle Zach Sieler to be disruptive with both Chubb and Phillips out. The same Sieler who transformed himself from a 200-pound beanpole into a bearded, 300-pound, alligator-hunting NFL prospect by working his tail off inside Ferris State’s “concrete dungeon” of a weight room.
They’ll need this muscle in Miami.
They’ll also need players differentiating injury from pain. Any path to victory demands dynamic plays from Hill, who’s been gritting through an ankle injury. McDaniel called the wide receiver a “warrior,” adding that he “takes that ‘C’ on his chest very serious.”
“He’s done some inspiring things making sure he’s on the field,” McDaniel said. “He’s a fast guy that cuts very violently. So I don’t think people can totally understand the amount of toughness it takes to do what he does. That’s just physics and science. He can’t tip-toe around in his game. Nor does he. He’s done everything the team could ask for, and more. I think that’s helping guys really commit to each other.”
The Bills will likely umbrella coverage over the top on Hill, especially if Waddle cannot go.
Fear of Hill burning his defense for another touchdown was a major reason why McDermott aligned his defense in such a passive coverage those 13 seconds at Arrowhead Stadium. His presence can completely warp the geometry of your scheme. But since that night, as a Dolphin, the league’s fastest wide receiver has not killed the Bills. He’s gone for games of 33, 69, 69 and 58 yards through one win and three losses.
Buffalo’s defense has improved sharply the last month of the season. Cornerback Rasul Douglas is everything this secondary needed. Ed Oliver’s pass rush is changing momentum. Von Miller has been invisible and inactive and it doesn’t even matter.
McDaniel maintained this is a different Dolphin team than the one Buffalo dismantled three months ago.
Back then, he said, players were merely running the system. In all three phases.
Now, he sees ownership.
“There’s incredible power to that,” McDaniel continued. “When we’re at our best, that’s what you’re seeing. It’s not anybody’s plays, play calls, systems. It’s theirs. Which I firmly believe because they are the painters. They’re doing all the stuff. We give advice. We give every tool we could possibly give in terms of preparation. And then we try to put players in the best position to succeed. But they’re the ones who are out there doing all of it — the doing part. All 11 wins have been an orchestration of that. They take pride in their work because this is their art, their craft. And they’re not speaking a second language anymore.”
“You have to have true ownership for you to evolve. We’ve been talking about December and January all year. They’ve taken it upon themselves to work at developing their craft.
“We’re in the moment now. It’s cool to see guys take ownership of their moment, and know it’s going to be a fun product Sunday night.”
That’s the best way to manifest a team that’ll play on instincts when there’s only a handful of seconds left in a game.
The Dolphins have shaken off their loss to the Ravens.
But none of this talk matters if another season peters out.
Exactly as it’s on Sean McDermott to prove he can deliver late in a playoff game, it’s on the Dolphins to prove they’re built completely different than what you think.
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Game 272 could be a defining moment for the Bills…
The McDermott Problem series…
Part I: Blame Game
Part II: Lost in translation
Part III: Let Josh be Josh
Dolphins stories past…