Showing posts with label Chad Henne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chad Henne. Show all posts

Friday, July 29, 2011

Say hello to the 5-11 Miami Dolphins in Jeff Ireland & Tony Sparano's last year with the clueless, unappealing Dolphins

The worst is yet to come!
Above and below, just some of the dozen Chad Henne jerseys that were NOT flying off the shelves at the Aventura Target last year. October 9, 2010 photos by South Beach Hoosier.
Yes, "the Venezuelan Target," home of la bellessima!


The same store that presciently had the Ronnie Brown #23 jerseys on clearance months and months ago, even as the Dolphins were pretending that he would be coming back to the team this year.
Don't you hate it when retail outlets have a better grasp of the obvious with the team than the people who actually work for the team? The so-called experts.

As I've written here for years, and gotten abuse for saying in numerous Herald stories about the Dolphins, developer and Dolphins owner Steven Ross has no business owning the team, and is making the Dolphins a combination of the worst of the worst -the Bengals of the '90's and the Lions of just three years ago.

Ross may be the single-worst NFL owner around, which is really saying something given the miscues and screw-ups of Jacksonville and Carolina's owners.

Hey Mike Dee, how's that Club LIV at the stadium doing?

View more videos at: http://nbcmiami.com.


Club LIV Comes to Sun Life Stadium
First of its kind nightclub at a football game ready to debut
By Adam Kuperstein | Thursday, Sep 23, 2010 | Updated 7:45 AM EDT

See also:
LIV nightclub creators bring South Beach nightlife experience to Sun Life Stadium for Dolphins football season

What a f-ing embarrassment!!!

I've got a lot more to say about the dismal prospects for this once-proud team that has fallen into a black hole, but since today is the first day of training camp, the day that savvy Dolphin fans have been dreading since the lockout started, I'd have been remiss if I hadn't posted this Henne photo, which I've been saving for months just for today's post.
I'll likely have more this weekend, once Matt Moore has arrived from Carolina.
Yes, Matt Moore.

That was their back-up plan, after they refused to take a chance on Ryan Mallette or move up in May's NFL Draft, and then couldn't pull the trigger this week for someone else?
(Patriots snapped Mallette up!)
Yes.

Folks, this year, like a bad move that keeps repeating, Dolphin fans are stuck on the S.S. Titanic and this time, we passengers know the iceberg is out there, but they keep steering right towards it, anyway.
Over-and-over!

For once, almost six months ago, I actually agreed with Armando Salguero.

Miami Herald
Too many reminders of Miami Dolphins’ futility
By Armando Salguero
Posted Sunday February 6, 2011
It’s becoming something of a depressing yearly rite that we look at the Super Bowl teams and think about what might have been for our Dolphins.
If only someone with a functioning brain would have made this or that decision correctly, stuck with this player or that coach, then maybe, we say, fate would have been written differently and that might be our team playing for the Lombardi Trophy on Sunday.

Remember back in the late 1990s when the Patriots went to Super Bowl XXXI with Keith Byars and Jeff Dellenbach? Remember the Packers that eventually won that game boasted Keith Jackson as their tight end?

Remember when the Dolphins discarded all three players?

Last year, Dolphins fans watched in disgust as Drew Brees – the quarterback the Dolphins could have had but passed on twice – helped New Orleans win it all.

This year, the local lament is about coaching talent that got away.

When the Steelers and Packers play this Super Bowl, Dolphins fans can take absolutely zero solace in the fact Mike Tomlin once interviewed for the Miami head coach job and was passed over for someone far less capable of doing the work.

In the first month of 2007, the Dolphins were searching for a coach to replace Nick Saban and identified Tomlin as a rising star worth a visit. They talked to Tomlin. Probed him. Considered him.

Then they passed on him.

A bad choice“Too hip-hop,” one Dolphins employee who had a say in that decision would say of Tomlin weeks later.

Miami went with Cam Cameron instead.

Tomlin interviewed with the Steelers days after his Miami interview. He hadn’t suddenly gotten wiser. He hadn’t magically become a better coach. He was just himself – prepared, pointed, optimistic, realistic.

Tomlin got the job succeeding Bill Cowher.

If the Steelers win on Sunday, that would deliver to Tomlin his second Super Bowl ring as Pittsburgh’s coach and third overall because he’s got one from Super Bowl XXXVII when he was the defensive backs coach for Tampa Bay.

“Every day I go to work, I don’t think about things I have to do, I think about the things I can do to make my men successful,” Tomlin said this week in North Texas. “So I have a servant’s mentality in terms of how I approach my job, and I get that from coach [Tony Dungy].”

A Tony Dungy disciple with a servant’s heart.

Too hip-hop, the Dolphins decided.

I’m not saying Tomlin would have come to Miami and overcome a roster that lacked talent and certainly didn’t compare to Pittsburgh’s. I’m not saying he would have won a Super Bowl already in Miami as he has in Pittsburgh.

I am saying the Dolphins looked in this guy’s eyes and didn’t see what the Rooneys saw when they interviewed Tomlin. They didn’t find out what the Rooney family found out.

That is the difference between being great and being good. Teams such as the Packers and Steelers look at players or coaches other teams have similarly studied and see something special the others miss.

I remember a phone conversation with Saban in 2005 in which he told me he was about to hire Dom Capers. “He’s one of the best defensive coaches out there and he has been for a long time,” Saban said.

Within a couple of years of Capers’ hiring, very few folks in South Florida would have believed that he was among the best at anything. As defensive coordinator of the 2007 Dolphins, he managed to author the worst run defense in the league and the Dolphins ranked 30th in points allowed.

Capers was fired. This year, under Capers’ direction, the Packers were second in fewest points allowed which was an improvement over last season when Capers had his unit ranked seventh in fewest points allowed.

Did Capers become a terrible coach in 2007 after having proved to Saban previously he was an outstanding coach? Did he, becoming suddenly idiotic in 2007, regain his senses the past two years in Green Bay?

Or is it that Capers never stopped being an outstanding coach, but was simply victimized in 2007 by too many injuries ravaging a roster lined with far too little talent?

Great teams often recognize talented people down to their roots. They get a conviction about people. Then they stick to those convictions when crisis hits – which, in the NFL, is every week.

“Panic doesn’t seem to work. Let’s put it that way,” Steelers president Art Rooney II said. “There are enough people that seem to have gone through that mode and our feeling is that you pick good people and you try to stick with them if you have good people. There are ups and downs in any sport, but if you have the right people in place, you’ll always have a chance to be successful and that’s what we do. ”

Do you hear that Tony Sparano doubters?

Is Miami’s current coach the best head coach in the NFL this year? No. His team couldn’t finish strong or win at home.

But did the guy who led the Dolphins to perhaps the most dramatic turnaround in NFL history – going from 1-15 to 11-5 in one year – suddenly becoming incapable of leading and coaching his team?

Formula for successIt speaks well of club owner Stephen Ross that he didn’t knee-jerk and replace Sparano with an unproven Jim Harbaugh last month. The cautious approach might not be rewarded with a title next season, but it gives the Dolphins a chance to have continuity.

And the Steelers, a club with only three coaches since 1969 and having never fired any of them, have proven that continuity can bring success.

The hope is Ross sees something in Sparano, knows something about Sparano that convinced him to keep Sparano even while some were calling for the coach’s head.

The Dolphins have too rarely made us think they know something no one else does. They made us feel that way in 1983 when they picked Dan Marino late in the first round.

They made us feel that way lately when they plucked Cameron Wake out of CFL obscurity and within two seasons saw him go to the Pro Bowl.

But for the couple of decades now, the Dolphins have mostly been among those folks that weren’t aware or didn’t know or missed on a guy by just this much.

That’s not an indictment on the team’s current administration. That’s an indictment on administrations going back to Jimmy Johnson.

The Dolphins missed on Randy Moss, Anquan Boldin, and Brees twice. This isn’t second-guessing or playing the result. All of those players were favored, expected, supposed to join the Dolphins if the brainiacs leading the franchise had been thinking straight.

So where does that leave us?

The hope is Miami folks currently in charge can avoid the curse that obviously befell their predecessors. The hope is the folks running the Dolphins now know something other teams do not.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

That's not a chill, that's a Draft: With Dolphin fans at emotional nadir, will team continue frustrating at NFL Draft? Pick Mallett!

Above, Notre Dame QB Brady Quinn in New York for the 2007 NFL Draft -as seen on ESPN- reacting to the news that the Miami Dolphins had chosen Ohio State WR Ted Ginn, Jr. with their first-round selection and not him, to the vocal consternation of the Dolphin fans assembled around me at the Dolphins HQ in Davie, Florida. Screenshot by Mario J. Bermudez.

That's not a chill, that's a Draft!
Will the Miami Dolphins continue their recent feeble track record of confounding their frustrated fans by 'missing' and overestimating some player's "upside" or under-appreciating talented players who didn't play in big conferences, that other teams routinely score coups with?


(Don't forget, they didn't draft WR Devon Bess of Hawaii, though for long stretches of the past two seasons, he has been their best, most-consistent and hardest-working player.
I'm glad he's on the team obviously, but what does that say about the actual draftees? Exactly.)

Well, since I was never in favor of the Stephen Ross regime as owner, or his hiring of Jeff Ireland and Tony Sparano as general manager and head coach respectively, I would guess the answer is NO.


In fact, my guess is that if the team performs as poorly as I expect this season if they don't show some imagination and make some good decisions in the draft that involve a certain amount of gambling, as well as sign solid guys during free-agency over the next four months, I expect the Dolphins to be in last place in the AFC East by the time December rolls around.

Then they will be playing the Eagles, Patriots and Jets in three of the last four regular season games, and the fourth game is at Buffalo the week before Christmas, and with the Patriots game in Foxboro on Christmas Eve.

Yes, at Buffalo and at New England in late December.

Hmm-m... what's the Dolphins record in cold weather games in December the past ten years?
Exactly.

Given that, I expect that this will be Ireland and Sparano's last year with the Dolphins.

Their track record is completely unsatisfactory and the Dolphins feeble efforts at home games last year was one of THE biggest embarrassments in the recent history of the NFL.

Not just losing at home, mind you, but seeming at times to not even be trying or to even know what plays they were supposed to be doing.
It was worse than exasperating and
nobody looked worse than Chad Henne, whom I was never ever sold on to begin with.

And three hours before the draft starts, the most recent video on the nfl.com site for the Dolphins is about the Brandon Marshall stabbing, not something about draft strategy.
http://www.nfl.com/videos/miami-dolphins
Pathetic!

To me, based on all the available information available and the games I've watched via the myriad regional sports packages of DirecTV, the Dolphins absolutely have to draft QB Ryan Mallett of Arkansas if he is still available and has not been selected by either the Redskins at #10 or the Vikings at #12.

While clearly not without some flaws, Mallett has the physical ability to get the ball to spots that few others can -on a dime- and the mental ability to learn from his mistakes and correct them, something that Chad Henne has repeatedly proven he can't do, no matter how obvious it is to players and fans alike.


NFL.com video: QB Quandry: Worst case scenario
http://www.nfl.com/videos/auto/09000d5d81f76d4f/QB-Quandary-Worst-case-scenario

If they draft an offensive lineman with this selection, as many of the experts on ESPN and the NFL Network have suggested, save Mike Lombardi,
http://www.nfl.com/draft/2011/mock-drafts to me, they will have officially become the woeful Lions of the early '80's or the St. Louis Cardinals before they fled west to Arizona: a couple of very talented guys in places, maybe even a pro Bowl player here and there, but by no reasonable measure a real team that can hope to win more than 8 games without their opponents collapsing.
Is that what Dolphin fans want?

I don't think so, b
ut there is nothing on the resume of Ireland and Sparano that shows that either separately, much less when working together, they can help themselves from drafting a talented-but-safe player like Florida offensive lineman Mike Pouncey.
The past is prologue.

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/teams/page/MIA/miami-dolphins