Winners and Losers from the Miami Dolphins’ week 8 loss
By Tj Ray
The Miami Dolphins are officially the worst team in the league. I don’t care that the Lions don’t have a win, they are at least fun to watch and seem to care. They have an exciting new coach that will cry manly tears when their guys get close but can’t close out the game. The Lions are at least trying some crazy trick plays because obviously nothing else is working.
The Dolphins have a coach that will meekly say “Tua is our quarterback” every time he’s asked to commit to the guy they picked 5th overall just a year ago and dispel rampant trade rumors. The Dolphins have no offensive line. The Dolphins have no offense, period. The Dolphins also don’t have their own first round pick next year, so these losses all sting just a little bit more. To make matters worse, the Jets won today, making the Dolphins the last in the division once again.
Loser: Brian Flores
It’s time to make some changes. I’ve never been a fan of firing a coach mid-season, but something needs to happen and it needs to happen soon. Whether that something is firing Flores or firing one of the twelve offensive coordinators I don’t know, but this team needs a spark somehow. The play calling today was suspect at best. There were obvious miscommunications. No one seemed to know where to line up and there were illegal shifts and penalties galore. In a game that was close until it wasn’t, those types of simple errors are what take a team that went 10-6 last year and lead them to seven straight losses. Fans are going to be calling for someone’s head, it’s really just a matter of who gets the axe at this point.
Winner: The Defense
Last week the Dolphins’ defense wasted the season’s best offensive performance. This week the Dolphins offense wasted the season’s best defensive performance. For the first half, the defense was playing lights out. The defense got overwhelmed in the second half, but can you blame them? They were on the field entirely too much in this game and there’s only so much you can do when there’s no offensive production at all… which brings us to our biggest loser of the day.
Loser: The Entire Offense
A competent professional football team is at least leading 17-3 at halftime in this game. Instead the offense missed a 36-yard field goal and fumbled the ball by snapping it straight into a shifting tight end to end the first half. The offense wasn’t just bad against Buffalo, it was hard to watch. Painful, even. The offensive line didn’t get off the plane. The receivers didn’t show up other than DeVante Parker, but he disappeared after the first half.
The run game was non-existent. Tua didn’t do much to shut up the haters and there will be people saying the Dolphins made a mistake not trading for Watson, even with all of his legal concerns, if something doesn’t change on this offense. I have a crystal ball here and I can see into the future. Tua is going to go to another team and have a long and successful career there. The inability of the Dolphins franchise to support and develop young quarterbacks is baffling.
There really isn’t a lot that can be said about this team right now that hasn’t already been said. Things are bad and getting worse. But if you don’t like that, you don’t like Miami Dolphins football. See you next week for our weekly dose of pain and misery.