Miami Dolphins head coach Jeff Hafley knew it was an ambitious undertaking to sign on to his current job. The team was going full Bruno Caboclo on the future: Two years away from being two years away.
That's a bit hyperbolic, sure, but it might as well have been that far off when Hafley took the reins. To his credit, and to the players in the Dolphins locker room, it seems everyone is buying into the rebuild and the culture Hafley is trying to establish.
Hafley spoke about this around this time last week. It was further validated not only by Miami's valiant effort in a 24-10 loss to the Chiefs, but also by Hafley's legendary Kansas City counterpart, Andy Reid.
Andy Reid echoes NFL-wide sentiment that Hafley's Dolphins are playing their hearts out
It appears to be business as usual for the dynastic Chiefs after their down 2025 campaign, which, if you can believe it, yielded a worse record than the Dolphins! But Andy Reid still implied after Sunday's victory that, to improve to 3-0, Miami is moving in the right direction, sharing an exchange he had with Jeff Hafley to commend the Dolphins' effort:
"One thing I mentioned to him was his guys play hard, and play hard every snap. That means they're listening and trusting him, and that's a positive that he can build on. and he'll do that. He's a sharp guy. He's got a good staff. They play hard."
When Hafley delivered the following statement at the presser podium following Week 2's awful 35-13 loss to the 49ers in San Francisco, it felt a little hard to believe.
"When you turn on the tape, there's an element of toughness in how hard we're playing that jumps off the tape and I hope everybody sees that. And every person I've talked to in this business, whether it's a coach, whether it's a scout, whether it's somebody from an opposing team, a coach from another team, it jumps off the tape and that's really important to me."
"We have to establish that and we have to build off of that. And when you turn on the last couple plays of the game on both sides of the ball, they're playing just as hard as they did on the first and those are things that we can control."
On the one hand, it just goes to show how talent-deficient Miami's roster is. Expectations were understandably low for Week 3.
But no matter what fans' feelings are about the severe measures the Dolphins took to tear this team down, this is wildly encouraging. If there's a more respected or accomplished head coach in the NFL today than Big Red, I don't know who it is. Reid went out of his way to applaud Hafley and a team he knew was outmanned and outclassed in every conceivable way before kickoff.
This reminds me a bit of the dawn of the Detroit Lions' Dan Campbell-Brad Holmes era. Not dissimilar to Holmes, Miami GM Jon-Eric Sullivan has jettisoned most of the prior regime's big-name players in favor of building a new foundation from the ground up.
Whether Sullivan has a miraculous draft class like Holmes did in 2023 remains to be seen. But what I'm getting at here is Campbell's emotional interview that very year, when he reflected on the players from the past who helped lay the gritty groundwork for the Lions to turn things around.
Many of those Lions weren't on the team to see the larger goals through. They were putting themselves on the line to build a better tomorrow. That'll be the case for much of this current Miami core, too.
Hafley is a very different dude than Campbell. Much quieter and more measured, but he's getting similar buy-in. That's pretty awesome.
Between Campbell's Lions and the Kyle Shanahan-led 49ers who Hafley just faced, there's plenty of evidence around the NFL that a steady, patient rebuild can yield long-term stability and success.
The fact that Andy Reid can already see the strides Hafley's Dolphins are making bodes very well for when they have the resources in the next two years to dramatically upgrade their roster talent.
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