Dave Hyde: Dolphins spent three years rebuilding the same mediocre team they tore down

You can feel the football season shutting depressingly down now. This always happens after the Miami Dolphins are eliminated from the playoffs, all false hope and fool’s gold gone.

Another end. Another mess. There’s always some game like Sunday’s 34-3 loss to Tennessee, where reality slaps the back of the Dolphins’ fans head, like a Three Stooges scene, and everyone sees how things really are.

There may have been worse season-enders than this one against Tennessee.

Name one.

This didn’t just ended a season. It ended the schedule-inflated seven-game win streak. It ended a three-year Ponzi scheme of a plan, too. Conclusions are in. They aren’t pretty.

General Manager Chris Grier blew it drafting quarterback Tagovailoa over Justin Herbert.

This offense constructed with big, expensive parts scored fewer points (19.3) than the 2018 offense led by Jay Cutler (19.9) that led to the rebuild.

The Dolphins, at 8-8, spent three years re-constructing the same average team they so gleefully tore down.

They play boring football, too. That’s subjective, I know. But, come on, this is mind-numbing stuff.

What a plan. What a joke. If you watch this kind of season enough through the years, you can get angry for what they’ve done to the Dolphins.

It’s not just this regime. They’re just the latest. That’s even said with an appreciation for the tough style and disciplined brand of Dolphins coach Brian Flores.

But for anyone who was around back when this franchise won, back when the question in any season was how far they’d go in the playoffs, this year was simply an add-on to two decades of watching a well-tailored, well-groomed person turn into a bum.

It’s embarrassing. Down there with the Titanic wreck, down with the New Coke formula, sits this latest Dolphins’ rebuilding plan. What even was the plan in retrospect? Tanking? Hitting on draft picks? Did they really follow either well?

Tanking, as I wrote at the start, is about the dumbest plan you can have in sports. The Dolphins didn’t even do it right. The front office tanked. The coach didn’t.

The front office traded away talent for draft picks. The coach refused to lose to Cincinnati in the second-to-last game of 2019 when LSU quarterback Joe Burrow was the prize.

There was Burrow late Sunday afternoon, smoking a cigar after lifting a terrible Cincinnati franchise to the playoffs. There was Flores talking about not making the playoffs again.

“Disappointing,’ he called it over and over.

Here’s another line written three years ago: The franchise that’s so dumb it has to tank for a quarterback is too dumb to build around him. Proof?

It looks bad enough today to have passed on Herbert to draft Tagovailoa. That’s the kind of move that gets people fired. What compounds it is the Dolphins didn’t give Tua a fighting chance.

The offensive line was built with expensive draft picks. Is there any clear keeper beyond guard Robert Hunt?

The receivers are roster-fillers beyond Jaylen Waddle. He’s everything you could hope for as a rookie. He also wasn’t the big-play receiver the Dolphins could have taken in Mike Pitts and especially Ja’Marr Chase.

Oh, the defense looks great. At least it looked great against the mostly backup quarterbacks in that seven-game win streak. But there was Tennessee coach Mike Vrabel telling his team after it ran for 198 yards on the Dolphins, “The most physical team won. And we didn’t turn the football over, and they just kept giving to us and we kept taking it from them.”

Three more years wasted. That’s the theme as this season heads to a finale against New England. The Patriots’ Bill Belichick rebuilt his team to the playoffs in one year. Cincinnati did under Burrow’s two years. The Los Angeles Chargers remain alive for the playoffs with Herbert carrying them this last Sunday of the regular season.

Once upon a time, this was the best time to be a Dolphins fan, January with the playoffs on the calendar. Now it’s just a time to start laying blame.

It’s not just another season shutting down now. It’s this latest, three-year plan. It stunk. It sunk. They’ve officially rebuilt the mediocre team they tore down three years ago.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3JxqV1f