Brian Flores is already better than these Miami Dolphins head coaches
By Brian Miller
Judging Brian Flores after only one season is not smart but he is still better than these former Miami Dolphins coaches.
Brian Flores has yet to start a second season with the Miami Dolphins and his one season yielded a paltry five games in the win column, yet where does he rank right now among former coaches?
When the 2020 season concludes we will have a better idea of what kind of coach Brian Flores is. We all pretty much came away with a very good overall impression of Flores when he took a cast of nobodies and turned them into a franchise that won five games, including a season-ender in New England.
Now it is too early to start talking about Flores in the same vane as Don Shula and he has a long way to go before that ever happens, still, where would he rank right now if he were put up against the previous coaches of the Miami Dolphins.
For starters, we can put Don Shula out of this conversation. We can also take off Jimmy Johnson and Dave Wannstedt because while they may not have taken Miami to a Super Bowl, they had success, enough at least, to be better than a one-year head coach.
No worries though, if last season was any indication, I would think that Johnson and Wannstedt are clearly going to find themselves sitting behind Flores, eventually. Of course, that would mean that Flores would become the 2nd best coach in Dolphins history wouldn’t it?
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For now, I won’t hit you with four or five slideshows to say that I put Flores just behind Tony Sparano and Nick Saban but that is really a very close comparison. Flores has shown leadership and has earned the respect of his players, that was something that Sparano carried with him. The bar isn’t entirely high though. Sparano had a really good 2008 but it went south after that.
Flores still has to turn the franchise around but already, I would take him over Joe Philbin and Adam Gase any day of the week or year. Both were terrible head coaches for the Dolphins. We can easily put him above Cam Cameron who frankly, I forgot existed until I start thinking of Ted Ginn, Jr.
The only other HC’s that Miami has had were interim coaches and while I like both Jim Bates, Todd Bowles, and Dan Campbell, I would still take Flores over any one of them. George Wilson, Sr. took the Dolphins over as an expansion team and despite having several future HOF players, he couldn’t do anything with them.
By wins alone, Flores ranks eighth overall as the 13th head coach in Dolphin’s history. Behind him are Cameron, Bowles, Bates, and Campbell. Despite that, it would be a shock if anyone felt that Flores wasn’t already a better coach than Philbin and Gase who couldn’t get the respect of their players.
Flores is probably more in line with Sparano and Saban and what he does, obviously, in the next season or two will determine if what we saw last year was a sign of things to come or something more like what we saw with Gase and Sparano in their first seasons.