NFL Miami Dolphins

Miami Dolphins Are Stuck In Neutral

Miami Dolphins, New York Jets

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With Sunday’s loss to the New York Jets, the Miami Dolphins blew yet another chance at achieving a winning season for the first time since 2008, and proved beyond a doubt that this is a franchise that is stuck in neutral.

At the beginning of the season, Dolphins fans everywhere were pleading with the team to be anything but mediocre, and that is exactly what Miami was this year. It would have been far easier to swallow missing the playoffs with a deplorable record compared to having another golden opportunity slip away.

Ryan Tannehill became only the second Dolphins quarterback to throw for 4,000 yards in a season, and the team still wasn’t able to finish the year with a winning record. Couple that with the fact it this was the only season in team history that the Dolphins had a 1,000-yard rusher in conjunction with the 4,000 passing yards, thanks to Lamar Miller‘s 1,000-yard campaign, and it becomes even more disturbing. All of this is indicative that something is seriously wrong with this team, and keeping the status quo is not the way to solve the problem.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” and that is precisely what the Dolphins are doing. Yes, some of the pieces change each year, but the same lack of identity pervades.

It now appears that owner Stephen Ross was intent on keeping head coach Joe Philbin regardless of how the season ended, and perhaps that is a good thing. If the Dolphins couldn’t win the Jim Harbaugh sweepstakes, the most likely candidates for the job would have been at best a lateral move from Philbin, and in many cases, it would have been a step down. Still, something has to change if the Dolphins expect to make the leap to the NFL’s upper echelon.

Since the end of the Don Shula era, it has been nothing short of torture to watch this team falter year after year, and fans are getting tired of it. Unless something changes drastically this offseason and the Dolphins can find some semblance of a desire to become an elite team, there is no reason to believe that next year will be anything but another disappointment.

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