Couldn't have said it better myself. And whether or not it's justified, whether or not it's smart, I believe the fact is, a loss to the Jags means Flores won't be back next year.
Spot on analysis. Our only hope is Flo rights the ship. So many players are underperforming their contracts and draft spot. But there is still 12 games and I’m hoping Tua can provide the spark. Do I think he’s the long term answer? No. But he’s leaps and bounds better than Brisset and maybe, just maybe, people didn’t fight as hard knowing they had no chance to win a game with him.
We are already in the disaster , not facing one. If columns like this are being written, it’s already over.
I agree. Beat Jacksonville and Atlanta, and look a lot better in doing so than they have the past few weeks, and they're alive. They would need help to make the playoffs, but they could salvage the season in a subjective manner by winning and putting up points against a weak schedule (still ranked as the easiest remaining slate in the league). Go something like 8-4 the rest of the way, and Flores is back in 2022 most likely. But lose this week, and it not only puts the team into a 1-5 hole that's impossible to crawl out of with respect to the playoffs, but it would mean that you've lost to one of the worst teams in the league and that the Dolphins themselves may be the very worst team themselves. And then things might get really messy.
I was trying earlier to think of a team/staff that came back from a hole like this and went on to be successful - not just in that year but on down the line as well. I was struggling to come up with anyone.
The only Dolphins team to ever end up with a winning record after starting 1-3 or worse was 2016, when they started 1-4 and ended up at 10-6. Can Flores figure out a way to turn Gaskin into Ajayi? Obviously, Gase wasn't good and nothing he/they did was sustainable long term.
There's always that great exception to early coaching success: Tom Landry. Started off with 0-11-1, 4-9-1, 5-8-1, 4-10, 5-8-1 seasons before a 7-7 season after which he had 20 straight winning seasons and 2 Super Bowl wins. But that's pretty rare. Flores has to right the ship this year and produce a winning record. He's had enough time.
I don’t even care about playoffs this year knowing what Grier has done to our roster and some of the big misses he’s had in the draft. For me it’s about proving Flo can coach so that it we get a new GM and they can draft better, that he’s the guy to lead us to the playoffs and a super bowl. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if Ross is smart enough to fire Grier.
A few things to keep in mind: Both Jones and Howard and playing hurt. The D is just 'eh' without them healthy We've played 4 very good opponents and 1 bad one. However, we lost to the bad one The offensive line is a massive liability and can't be fully fixed this season Tua is essentially a "year 2" rookie and his weapons are useless if plays can't develop The ground game looks decent, but it's also useless playing from behind There's three fixes that could turn this team around: Figure out the line and protect Tua. Then we can evaluate our offense & use our weapons effectively Sit Jones and/or Howard to let them heal up. Start Iggy and Needham until our stud CB's are healthy Finish drives. We left so many points off the board against Buffalo, Vegas and Indy. Tampa pulled away, but there were paths to victory in the other 3 losses. We just couldn't complete drives We were an obvious PI away from beating the Raiders in overtime, so I'm not stressing over that loss. We played hard and it was competitive. With the Bills and Bucks, we were just outclassed and we all expected losses there. I don't love how we self-destructed late in those games, but it is what it is. With Indy, we should have been up 21-0 or more at halftime...we walked all over them but couldn't score points. So there were some positives there in all four losses, we just need to tighten it up all the way around. At this point, I'm no longer thinking playoffs because it just doesn't matter. But could we still win 9 or 10 games? Absolutely. it's just back to fundamentals- fix the line, get your corners healthy, protect your QB so he can make plays. Then capitalize on those drives and we're back in the hunt. I honestly don't know if all that's possible but I do agree that some jobs will be on the line if it doesn't. My new over/under for the season is 8.5 wins. If we go 7-10 or 8-9, we're in that grey area where it could go either way. Anything less and multiple people should be fired. But at 8-8-1 or better, I'm happy to say it's inexperience and we need to give it another year. So that's my gauge for the year.
We’re in this after countless of swing and missed on the draft and free agency.. we always draft the small guy, the tweener, and the “need”. While letting big talent just pass by us.. Grier has got to go… if we lose this sunday, the team is going to start quitting on Flores. There is already some signs of it starting
That's why I laugh when people keep accusing Geier of taking the "safe" pick in the first few rounds. More often than not, he's not really doing that.
We got to get a win this weekend for starters. I don't care if it takes Jason Sanders kicking fix field goals to do it, we need a W bad! I feel really good about beating both Jacksonville and Atlanta these next two weeks. We'll have an opportunity to climb back into the race, but we're going to have to notch a big win against a good team to do it.
If he'd taken the safe pick, we'd have a much better team. He's another one of these morons who thinks he's too smart for the NFL and that he's going to put together a great team by going against the grain. They're almost always wrong.
It’s not the players it’s 100% coaching. Flores had not been able to put together a staff of quality coaches period end of sentence. We have had multiple offensive in defensive coordinators who are well beyond their prime and out of touch or with zero real world coordinator experience. We draft talented players move them out of their detonates positions and give them bad coaching and expect to take the next step! This lies at the feet of Flores For in the field issues. I would bet my left show that if we left go the last 2 draft classes within a year or two max they would be key players on some other franchises.
Any team that underwent a total rebuild and drafted a QB early in the first round and hadn't yet had sufficient performance from him after turning the reins over to him would be facing a similar "disaster." The only reason this didn't occur last year after Tua was named the starter was because the defense buttressed his performance with takeaways, and Fitzpatrick was brought in as a "relief pitcher" on occasion. The problem is that defensive takeaways can't be relied upon because they're a largely random variable, and so Tua will now have to produce. If he produces at the necessary level, the "disaster" will end quickly.
Huh? You mean any team that cut or traded all their talented veterans and drafted poorly would be having a disaster? Yes I think we can all agree to that.
If they hadn’t yet gotten adequate performance from their highly drafted quarterback, yes. If they had, then no disaster.
How would you expect him to give even adequate performance when he's running for his life constantly and has no running game? That's not to say that he's not partially to blame. He was certainly drafted too high and has not lied up to his draft status. But that's also Grier's fault for picking him instead of Herbert.
Here are a couple of safe picks he could have grabbed off the top of my head. Tj Watt, Dalvin cook, ramcyzk, budda over Harris Kyle Pitts or Jamarr Chase instead of trading down Herbert over Tua Wirfs, Jeudy, Ruggs, Becton, Ceedee over Tua Micah Parsons or Surtain over Waddle Justin Jefferson over Austin Jackson Helaire over Noah Igbi we always end up with the little guy tho.. he got it right once with Minkah and Minkah saw this mess and wanted no part of it
I still don't understand how so many teams passed on TJ Watt. And think about this- if we signed him, there's a chance his brother JJ ended up with us as well once he forced his way into free agency.
The performance of quarterbacks in the NFL isn’t dependent on either running games or offensive lines.
I'd be a lot more careful with that statement. Taken literally it's false because there's a HUGE difference in average passer rating between a clean pocket vs. under pressure (depending on your measure even up to 30 points), which shows the OL matters a ton. On the other hand — and this is what you're alluding to — given the variation among OLs in the NFL (i.e. how often they produce a clean pocket), the OL accounts for a relatively small amount of variance in QB passer rating, on average at least. That distinction is important. Yes the OL matters in principle (i.e., the effect on a given play), but no, teams generally can't build OLs that are so much better than NFL average for it to make much of a difference in QB performance over time.
That isn't always the case. Tannehill performs great when his team can run the ball. When they can't, he's not that good.
Run the ball adequately. He doesn't need Henry to run for 200 yards to be effective, though it certainly helps. RT17 is an above average QB, not a HOFer, and that means that if he gets help, he can be highly effective. He rarely got that help in Miami. And teams can win a lot of games with an above average QB who gets that help. There are NFL teams in the Divisional Round of the playoffs like that every single season. (The Final Eight) Somewhere the Dolphins haven't been in twenty years now.
Tannehill is the ultimate tease. He was statistically average in Miami, then goes to Tennessee and in his first year was absolutely elite, second year well above average, and now in his 3rd year he's below average. It's not at all clear that at the end of his career we'll say he was "above average". Certainly those first 2 years in Tennessee were not a fluke from a purely statistical point of view, meaning that his performance can't be explained away by random variation for an "average" QB, but that doesn't mean his "true" level of ability was best discerned during those 2 years. As of right now his 89.5 passer rating corresponds to a z-score of -0.4788, which is 32nd percentile. He's currently bottom 1/3 in a league where the average passer rating is a whopping 95.78. So we'll see how he ends up this year and beyond. If he doesn't play that well going forward then he's certainly not "above average" career-wise.
Yeah, just look at last years super bowl. Most people would consider Mahomes a top 2-3 QB without question and he looked very average against TB while constantly under duress. Football is still won in the trenches while being showcased by QB’s.
I think we have one disaster that is causing so many other problems. I think the disaster is the offensive line. This is holding up the entire offense causing us to rely heavily on the defense. When the defense is out on the field a lot, they get worn out and are more susceptible to injury. What was the plan for the offense in the preseason? Get Tua to push the ball down the field. Did we bring in the personnel to do this? Yeah, this was the whole point of drafting Waddle and bringing in Fuller. Even with Fuller out, we absolutely have the guys to stretch the field. But if your line can't protect the QB, these plays simply cannot develop. So, when we see Waddle as essentially a 4 yard slant guy, it really is more of a product of the line. Tua is already hurt. Wanna guess the problem? The line again. I loved the game where they essentially used RB screens with Gaskin to offset the weakness of our line because in my heart of hearts, I knew that we simply could not run the ball. Which again, this comes back to the line forcing the coaches hands. I really want to know are the players the problem or is coaching failing to develop these guys? I really think that the offensive line is making the whole team look terrible. I think if we had the 16th ranked offensive line, our record would be vastly different.
I think Grier is again the problem here. He should have never gotten rid of the veterans on the OL this off-season. This line has so little NFL experience it’s no surprise they are struggling. On another topic, this kid Robinson at Texas looks like a future star in the NFL, if we can get a GM who values the RB position even a little bit.
Grier was relying on a group of players with average experience of what, 2 years? Sounds like a horrible plan when you’re trying to stretch the field. I still don’t understand why they moved on from Flowers and Karras. They’re better than anyone we currently have playing.
Too many poor evaluations on the personnel side and Flores and co completely ****ed up with Fitz, Tua and Gailey situations… Now if this staff was forced to play Tua last year when he wasn’t ready to play and Fitz didn’t deserve to be benched then we’ve got massive issues. If Flores handled the situations on his own accord then that’s about the dumbest and most disrespectful ways to handle all three situations ive ever seen at this level
I struggled to think it was Flores. He seems very sincere about his approach to play the best players etc. and be honest with his players. Plus, when needed he put Fitz back in. It seems more likely, to me, that either Grier or Ross or both, required Flores to put Tua in. Especially because the move took Gailey by surprise. I can't see Flores doing that. That said, whoever made the HC break his word to his players needs to go. If that's Ross we're in trouble. If it's Grier, he needs to be gone. On the plus side, Grier has managed to find some quality talent, but he seems to always want to get the sneaky good pick, to get cute in some shenanigans with moves and selections. He seems averse to just making solid picks and wants to always do something magical.
Those would both be considered exceptions to the rule in terms of the content of post #26 here. Just because quarterback play is sometimes dependent on offensive line play doesn’t mean it is in general.