At his first news conference this past week, Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel was asked about playing the NFL’s only winless team, the 0-5 Carolina Panthers, on Sunday.
“Well you guys would have no idea about a franchise losing five in a row, would you?” he said.
First, McDaniel straightened up the Dolphins. Now he’s after the rest of us. The Dolphins lost five consecutive games last year between an 8-3 start and losing at Buffalo in the playoffs, lest anyone forget or get too far ahead of ourselves. And McDaniel was assuring no one does.
But there’s more meat on this five-straight-loss idea that adds an extra dimension to Sunday’s game when you backtrack through the previous Dolphins decades. It’s not just that Carolina, adrift at sea, is who the Dolphins (4-1) were for so much of the past two decades.
It’s also that these Dolphins look so reborn under McDaniel’s vision that Dolphins fans shouldn’t ho-hum games like Sunday but open their team history book to understand why they matter. It’s not just finding ways to improve. From Don Shula to McDaniel, for Bob Griese and Dan Marino, the one constant to the Dolphins playoff success is gaining a home-field advantage.
Numbers don’t just back this up. They scream it.
The Dolphins are 15-7 in home playoff games.
They’re 3-12 in road playoff games.
There’s plenty of reasons why this could be from fans to weather to simply the better teams playing at home in the playoffs. The reasons don’t matter. That bottom-line matters. It’s why Sunday matters.
This is a chance to pile up another win in a part of the schedule they should be piled up.
Carolina, like the New York Giants last week, shouldn’t trouble the Dolphins beyond the any-given-Sunday possibility. It has the 25th-ranked scoring offense and 27th-scoring defense. Dolphins fans should recognize such losing placements. This is where you were for much of the past two decades. This is the team we watched.
Carolina’s five-game losing streak is something the Dolphins created seven times in the previous two decades. Only last season, as McDaniel referenced, did it come in a playoff year.
So Carolina is a team you should recognize right down to the questions at the top. Coach Frank Reich did a masterful job with his words this past week in pulling back the curtain of how owner David Tepper works in saying they talk once a week. Or did he?
“He wants to bring a winner to the Carolinas,” Reich said. “He pushes me, and pushes us, to that end. He wants to do whatever it takes, turn over every stone, churn it as much as he has to to produce winning football. So I appreciate those conversations. They’re always very challenging. He’s a super-competitive person. He’s not going to sit idly by.”
Then came the crux of the conversation:
“There’s different philosophies in ownership,” Reich said. “Some owners kind of stay away and don’t engage a whole lot. Other owners do. And his philosophy is he’s going to engage. And listen, it’s only been a short experience, but it’s been a really good experience. It hasn’t been fun. It’s not fun. Those meetings aren’t — I wouldn’t characterize them as fun meetings. But those meetings make me better and I trust they make us better.”
Translate that how you will. The good translation: Tepper and Reich work together. The bad translation: The coach diplomatically said the owner meddles. Either way, there are questions for Tepper in a 0-5 start that weren’t there.
Since 2009, Dolphins owner Steve Ross either meddled too much (see: Jim Harbaugh interview, Brian Flores lawsuit, Deshaun Watson and Tom Brady recruitment) or simply didn’t hire the right people (see: too many to list). He must have felt like Tepper does today.
Then Ross hired the no-name coach, who solved the quarterback and has people thinking a deep playoff run is possible and a game like Sunday is a speed bump. It should be, too. Carolina is who the Dolphins recently were, what we watched for years.
Now, Carolina should be a notch on the Dolphins quest for a home-field playoff advantage.
