Excitement builds for 2019 Miami Dolphins despite expectations
By Brian Miller
The Miami Dolphins are rounding the off-season corner and heading towards July with a new vision and hopes for the future.
When the Miami Dolphins take the field for training camp in 2019 and then as they start the season, expectations will not be very high but that has not diminished the hopes and excitement of a new chapter in Dolphins history.
Tempered enthusiasm is how many Dolphins fans feel. We have been there and we have been burned. Our excitement for change has led to the same old Dolphins year after year. This year may not be any different. In fact, it isn’t supposed to be any different. It’s supposed to be bad. Not “we are giving up” bad but still not very good.
Yet for some reason, the excitement surrounding this team is hard to dismiss. It’s not the addition of Josh Rosen or Ryan Fitzpatrick and surely isn’t the lack of depth and quality starters at defensive end. It’s Brian Flores and his coaching staff. But again, we have seen this before as well.
Way back in 2005, the Dolphins brought in the brilliant mind of Nick Saban. He did nothing. In 2007 they hired the brightest offensive coordinator in the NFL and Cam Cameron couldn’t. 2008 brought us Bill Parcells and his grocery store but Parcells, like Saban, bailed on the team three years in. Joe Philbin? Failure and then the excitement ratcheted up to a big level when Stephen Ross landed Adam Gase.
2005 – Fail. 2007 – Fail. 2008 – Fail. 2012 – Fail. 2016 – Fail. 2019?
Brian Flores has something that Gase, Philbin, Cameron, and Sparano didn’t have. He has a five-year contract fully guaranteed. He has the support of the owner and the general manager, Chris Grier to live through a rebuild that will take more than a year or two.
Flores is not here to win now but he will try. He isn’t here to walk in day one and start demanding that everyone in the locker room changes the culture as Gase wanted. Flores is here to build a winning environment and that culture change will come with success, down the road.
Flores is bringing a decade of experience along with him. A decade of winning experience and that too is exciting. Exciting with tempered enthusiasm. Can he really succeed? Can Brian Flores, a long time Patriot coach find the winning formula in Miami with the Dolphins?
First-time head coaches suffer through learning curves. The use of timeouts and challenge flags. Personnel groupings for the final two minutes of a half. There will be misses and there will be hits but what fans need to watch for is how the players react to Flores and what he is pitching. That is the exciting part of something new.
With the 2019 season around the corner it is easy to get jacked up about football even when the team you are jacked up about isn’t going to challenge for the division but then again, have they really challenged in the last decade or more or was that more or less inflated hope? I would say the latter.