Of all the NFL teams currently residing in the dumpster, the Miami Dolphins might be the most pungent. The quarterback, the offense, the defense—it all reeks. When things go badly, the head coach's job is to sniff out what stinks and address it. Mike McDaniel is just kind of spraying it down with Febreze and hoping it goes away.
On Sunday, quarterback Tua Tagovailoa went 12-for-23 with 100 passing yards and three interceptions, achieving a career-low single-game passer rating of 24.1, as Miami got thumped 31-6 by the Cleveland Browns. The Browns! The only nice thing you could say about that Dolphins game is that the Raiders were worse. The Fins are now 1-6, with their only victory coming over the winless Jets.
Looking at the bigger picture, McDaniel's stock is falling. The team reached the playoffs in his first two seasons, and the 2024 Dolphins turned a 2-6 start into an 8-9 finish, so he's shown competence. That said, his overall record after this weekend's loss is 29-29. The most damning stat might be that McDaniel is just 3-14 against winning teams. Now the Dolphins are struggling to beat the sadsacks, and McDaniel's characteristically dry demeanor makes him seem like a guy who knows he could be fired any day now.
McDaniel has never been the most charismatic speaker in pressers. That's not his strength, but it comes off as more of a quirk when his team is winning. He's the youngish, slightly rumpled dweeb who compensates for his external dorkiness by being an offensive genius. It's a lot less charming without the genius. The team is bad and the dork can't deliver a complete sentence after a loss. He's even botching the platitudes.
This is just how McDaniel is—he won't change his personality or style of coaching overnight. If it worked before, it can work again. But his shtick must be pretty irritating when your team is losing. It must suck to be a Dolphins fan, watch your team get their asses beat, and then have to hear this after the game:
"A game like this, we didn't see coming, in terms of our prep, but you absolutely with 100 percent certainty have to evaluate everything. I think it goes for, you know—no person or no player or no coach has got their hands clean, and we have to go back to work and, starting with me, do a better job. We have an NFL opponent and game next week that we have a lot of work to do. In the meantime, this is a step back for how we play football. I thought we had growth, and generally growth without results is a good thing for your team. In this case, it was not good enough."
Let it be known that I made the effort to clean up McDaniel's comments there, and took out most of his pauses and filler words. If I didn't want to do that, it'd look something like this (from later in that same presser):
"There's a lot of guys that will have an important work week, um, because, uh, we're not—I mean, if you, uh, are negatively affecting the football team, uh, routinely, um, I don't have a choice but to, um, you know, assess a different player, and, um, I have to coach, um, uh, a lot better as well. So we need, uh—we're gonna find out who and what we're made of."
What are you even talking about, man? This isn't just exclusive to this defeat, either. After a Week 2 loss to the Patriots, McDaniel dropped this gem: "To win games, you have to win the game, not lose the game—honestly. And that, that is how you lose the game." Not since Hue Jackson on the Cleveland Browns has a head coach more obviously signaled that they're ready to be fired.
On Monday, McDaniel followed up his threat of potential changes by sticking with Tagovailoa as the starting QB for Week 8 against the Falcons. "He is gonna take the snaps this week, and he is gonna be our starter this week, and my expectation is that we don't throw 10 picks," McDaniel said. Good time for a joke.
