Miami Dolphins bye week comes at a perfect time

The Miami Dolphins are on their bye week and will return to action in two weeks against the visiting New York Jets.

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For most teams bye weeks are a chance for players to recover from minor injuries and for teams to get healthier as a whole. For the last two seasons the Dolphins bye week came early following their week four games in London.

This time around however it’s not the health of the team that the bye week will serve as much as the extra time to continue learning the offensive and defensive systems that have started to click the last two weeks.

Miami is riding a two game winning streak and both wins came against very good teams. Jay Ajayi has run for over 400 yards in those two games but it’s the overall play on both sides of the ball that has the team potentially buying into what the coaches are teaching.

The Dolphins defense has been horrible stopping the run all year but in the last two games they have stopped the Steelers attack of Le’Veon Bell and last week shut down Buffalo’s rushing attack.

Against the Steelers the Dolphins held Bell to just 53 yards rushing. They gave a 60 yard rush to receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey. Last week the Dolphins held the Bills to 55 yards total with 35 of those yards coming on the legs of quarterback Tyrod Taylor.

Offensively the Dolphins have pretty much stifled themselves the last two weeks. While they put up 30 points on Pittsburgh and 28 on Buffalo, mental errors that include personal foul and taunting penalties have cost the Dolphins points.

Against Buffalo the Dolphins finally showed they could come from behind and close out a game.

The Dolphins will get much-needed rest this week but they will also have the chance to work on cleaning up their mental mistakes. Adam Gase has changed his approach to the team and scaled back some of what he wants his offense to do. additionally he has changed his focus from a pass happy system and is riding the legs of his running backs.

Overall what Gase is teaching on offense and what Vance Joseph is teaching on defense seems to be filtering into the heads of the players and when players realize that the systems work, they begin to understand them much better.

It’s too soon to know if the Dolphins will be able to turn the season around. To be honest they still have too many holes and too much inexperience and lack depth at almost every position. Regardless the team is playing at a much higher level than they showed in the first four weeks of the season.

Perhaps the bye week will help them accelerate some of that learning.