Miami Dolphins: 3 most beaten to death storylines going into training camp

These are the storylines or narratives if you will that didn’t quite get as annoying as the other ones, at least to me they didn’t.

Hopefully, Espn does come looking for me for the fairly obvious copyright infringement that I’m using to name this slide. Don’t tell me you don’t remember Top 5 Reasons You Can’t Blame? An incredible show hosted by Brian Kenny. I suggest you look up the episodes on YouTube. They have a great one Dan Marino and you can’t blame him for not winning a title that you can watch here.

These couple of topics were beaten like a dead horse for a little bit but eventually, everyone just let them rot.

Obviously, Brian Flores getting fired the day after the Miami Dolphins beat the New England Patriots in the last week of the season making their record 9-8 winning eight of their last nine games was going to be discussed a lot.

It was talked about a great deal understandably. Then when then things a complete left turn when Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL and the Miami Dolphins, Flores was the #1 issue. Those details about Flores have sort of subsided for now.

But there is still a good amount of Brian Flores talk still out there that I can do without. It mostly centers around can the defense play the way they did last year with him. Guess what? Like most of these narratives, we don’t know yet.

Everyone became an expert on the wide-zone running scheme.

After Mike McDaniel was hired, most fans of the Miami Dolphins rejoiced. Finally, the Dolphins went out and got one of these new-aged, pedal to the metal, offensive coaches from the Shanahan tree. The Shanahan lineage, overall, is a really good one in terms of NFL success so getting a coach who has been knee-deep with the Shanahans isn’t the dumbest route to take.

The Shanahan model is strongly based on the running game opening up easy passing lanes, especially with play-action. That running game is predicated on the wide-zone scheme. It’s what Mike Shanahan ran in Denver with Terrel Davis and no less than 50 other running backs all netting 1,000 yards rushing and it’s what his son, Kyle, ran in Atlanta and now San Francisco.

Mike McDaniel has been by Kyle’s side since Atlanta and was even the offensive coordinator in San Francisco last year running that same wide-zone scheme.

Well after McDaniel was named the head coach of the Miami Dolphins, tons of people came out of the woodwork wearing their offensive line coach hats trying to explain how the wide zone will be run in Miami.

I’m a guy who actually taught some wide-zone concepts when I was winning my back-to-back freshmen football championships(not a brag except it is) while also being an assistant offensive line coach for a varsity football team and I barely can explain how the wide-zone is going to look when the Dolphins put on the pads. I can throw out some terminology and some goals of the wide zone scheme but that doesn’t really mean anything.

I’m not saying that understanding the concepts of the wide zone is like creating nuclear fission, but there are a lot of folks who don’t know of what they speak. It’s fine that not everyone can explain the nuances of the scheme and talk actual football jargon, but it was like listening to that guy at the party who always has to one-up everyone else in their accomplishments and you know they’re full of it. I just started rolling my eyes a little bit.

We will see how Mike McDaniel will run his version of it soon enough and then we can all become experts. How does that sound?