Miami Dolphins history shows the heart of their problems

The Miami Dolphins have been a bad football team for almost two decades but the last 10 years have been the worse. There is a lot to learn from.

As Stephen Ross and the rest of the Miami Dolphins sit back and watch Ryan Tannehill advance to the AFC Championship, there are plenty of people wondering what went wrong. Ross is paying Tannehill $18.5 million to play for Tennessee while the Titans are on the hook for $1.8 million.

The kicker is if the Titans advance next week to the Super Bowl, Tannehill returns to Miami for the final show of the 2019 season. That can’t feel good for Ross.

Where is the issue? What is the problem? There are a million questions that have no answers. As I said earlier today, Ryan Tannehill is an average to good quarterback but in Miami, they rarely got average out of him. On social media, during Saturday nights trouncing of the Ravens, former Raven and Dolphins receiver Mike Wallace tweeted this.

Wallace and Tannehill never seemed to get on the same page and it led to a quick exit for Wallace from the team after two short seasons. While Wallace is direct and to the point, he is spot on and that is something that will not miraculously go away. Not until Stephen Ross changes it. He hasn’t yet and while Brian Flores may be on the right path, we have thought that before.

Looking back at the last decade, something we did at the end of 2019, you can read that here, Miami’s biggest issues were not finding the right players, it was getting the entire organization on the same page. Maybe that is the difference now, or at least what we hope will be the difference.

It doesn’t take much to recap the last decade. Ross was in full control and screwed up with Tony Sparano and the Jim Harbaugh affair. His bringing Jeff Ireland into it made it worse. When Ireland got involved things began to fall apart because now there were growing trust issues within the organization.

Internal power struggles began and that led to friction. Dawn Aponte and Ireland didn’t see eye to eye and Ireland didn’t relate with Philbin leading Philbin to side with Aponte. Ireland forced the Mike Sherman coaching change on Philbin and Philbin almost quit as head coach.

Ireland thought he could buy the talent. This was a similar approach taken in the final Wayne Huizenga ownership years. The talent wasn’t the issue. Coaching and culture was a problem for Ross. Ireland, Aponte, Philbin, were all problems internally. After Ireland was fired, it continued. Ross couldn’t land a general manager, he stuck with Philbin for another year, then added Adam Gase but Gase’s addition only added to the friction already present.

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There were too many figureheads again. Ross replaced Aponte, Ireland, Hickey, and Philbin with Gase, Chris Grier, and Mike Tannenbaum. Strong personalities collided without a mutual plan. While there was no rumored in-fighting among them, there were never reports of them being on the same page. Grier played the middle man as general manager but questions of who actually was in charge continued to be asked. Gase was given the roster that he wanted but lacked the vision to coach them.

Internal problems of any organization eventually filter down to the players on the field. The ones asked to win games and play hard but if the coach isn’t on the same page with management and management isn’t making decisions that benefit the coach, the players suffer. The play suffers. It’s a reason why so many players leave and play so much better than they did while with the Dolphins. Add to that bad coaching hires and it all implodes.

Now, maybe Ross has it right.

Ross reassigned Mike Tannenbaum who would leave the team shortly thereafter. He allowed Grier to work as the G.M. without interference. Grier was allowed to conduct the head coaching search the way he wanted and hire the guy he wanted. Ross was involved but let Grier do his thing.

Grier and Flores came together with a plan to fix the roster and the team and in doing so may have fixed the problems with the culture. It is too early to know for certain but they were resolute in their decisions and they made moves with the future the focus instead of simply trying to bandaid the wounds and move on.

For the first time in more than a decade, the Dolphins finished a year without any rumored internal squabbling. No more fighting and as the season progressed, it appeared that the two men overseeing the team on the ground level were working in unison.

The Dolphins leadership has been lacking for a long time and while fans are scratching their heads over moves that included a trade of two Pro-Bowl players, Laremy Tunsil and Minkah Fitzpatrick, and a trade of a QB that is one game away from the Super Bowl, things are looking better. Bandaids don’t fix bullet wounds and Miami has seen their fair share of fired shots. Maybe this time, they have it right.