Winning Ugly Was the Most Beautiful Outcome For Miami
Credit: Jim Rassol-Imagn Images
We had a word in South Beach for games like the Miami Dolphins played last season: Loss. The Dolphins went 1-5 in games where they scored 20 points or fewer. Their record in games where they scored once or fewer times in the first half was 0-2. Miami’s only win where they came back from a two-score deficit was a Week 6 match against the moribund Carolina Panthers.
And no Phins fan has to be reminded about how the team did against teams with winning records.
All the red flags for a Miami loss were there on Sunday, on full display for the home crowd at Hard Rock Stadium. For over 40 minutes, the Jacksonville Jaguars held the Dolphins to just four plays of 15 yards or more. The Jags bottled up Miami’s stars. Their defensive line took it to Miami’s suspect offensive line.
The hardships weren’t even limited to the poor first half. Tyreek Hill was detained by police before the game following an alleged traffic violation. So was Calais Campbell when he tried to intervene. “I see Tyreek in handcuffs, I’d seen, I feel like, excessive force so I get out of the car to try to de-escalate the situation, and I think the officer just… I don’t know why he felt the need to put me in handcuffs,” Campbell described.
But Mike McDaniel’s team did something they didn’t do much of last year: Hang tough through adversity.
“I think you try to prepare a team to handle the unknown,” said McDaniel when asked how a coach gets his team to overcome these moments. “A lot of things fall under the veil of adversity. And I think one common denominator is there is light at the end of the tunnel in any sort of life adversity.”
The Dolphins have handled off-the-field adversity well, as when Hill bounced back following a devastating house fire (though, thankfully, no one was hurt) late last season. But on the field? Against tough teams, put in tough situations, the Dolphins showed a lack of toughness on the field. That’s not our opinion — please send any angry emails to former Buffalo Bill and current Miami Dolphin Jordan Poyer, who said of the McDaniel Era Dolphins, “Over the past few years playing against this team, you get a sense that if you get on top of [them], they might fold” back in July.
And that’s why Week 1’s win mattered. Yes, the Jaguars may have only been a “winning team” in name only, as 9-8 is the NFL’s new 8-8. Sure, a September game at Hard Rock isn’t a December trip to Buffalo or Kansas City. But with all these circumstances before and during the game? You can’t take this one away from the Dolphins.
Especially when they won the game in a distinctly un-Dolphins way. Their second-half scoring did kick off with a one-play, 80-yard drive that the Phins made their bread and butter last season. But in order to get to that point, Jevon Holland had to take away a likely score for Jacksonville by forcing Travis Etienne Jr. to fumble. The flash doesn’t happen if Holland doesn’t come through with a hard-nosed play.
GOAL LINE FUMBLE. @MiamiDolphins take over!
📺: #JAXvsMIA on CBS/Paramount+
📱: https://t.co/waVpO909ge pic.twitter.com/Y505P5cVKn— NFL (@NFL) September 8, 2024
“Somebody’s got to start it off,” said Holland about the play. “Couldn’t let them score, so had to get the ball out.”
Holland made the play that needed to be made, and that’s the kind of thing the Dolphins hadn’t been able to do. Not when things got hard. Not the way that true contenders like the Chiefs, Bills, or Baltimore Ravens do.
“Nobody can change that but us,” explained Tua Tagovailoa after the game. “We went through a lot of adversity, but good teams find ways to win, even if it looks not as good.”
A team takes its cues from the quarterback, and Tagovailoa was ready to flex his leadership muscles to lift his team up at halftime. “It was a cool moment because it was genuine and it was not anything but constructive,” said McDaniel of Tua’s halftime speech. “It wasn’t, ‘let’s win’ or ‘let’s make plays.’ It was, ‘let’s adhere to our standard,’ which is what a captain and a franchise quarterback [has] to echo.”
Both Tagovailoa and McDaniel took steps toward silencing their biggest knocks in Week 1. Tua’s critics point out that he tends to perform poorly when his first read isn’t open. When things are easy, he’s awesome. When things are tougher and he has to advance in his progressions? Less so.
McDaniel was quick to point out that Hill wasn’t the first read on that deep-strike touchdown. “That was not number one in progression, that was number two,” said the coach. “It was something that we’ve put a bunch of work into [this offseason] to try and improve our offense. For those big plays to come on something [we emphasized], you couldn’t write the story better.”
As for McDaniel, his critics are quick to jump on him for abandoning the running game when things get hard. Here are the pass-run splits on Miami’s scoring drives:
- 7-14 touchdown: 5 runs, 7 passes
- 14-17 touchdown: 0 runs, 1 pass
- 17-17 field goal: 6 runs, 5 passes
- 20-17 field goal: 5 runs, 2 passes
On third-and-goal from the 1-yard line in the second quarter, McDaniel ran it up the middle for a score. When they hit another third-and-one deep into Jaguars territory, down a field goal? They ran it up the middle again. First down. On another third-and-one with 1:13 left? Yup, down Jacksonville’s throat, up the middle for their final first down of the night.
“It’s not that exciting… because we’re the best in the league in short yardage,” McDaniel joked with the media. “No, it’s the same thing [as with Hill being the second read on the touchdown], when you find success in places you put emphasis on, that’s rewarding. ”
The Dolphins won by finding the defensive plays, the short-yardage rushing plays, and the hard-nosed plays rewarding. This wasn’t the flash-first Phins of yesteryear, and if they keep playing this way, they’ll find it rewarding in the playoffs, too.
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