Dolphins offense poised for a leap in production like it did last season

This generally goes unsaid within the Dolphins organization, but it’s going to see light in this space: The team’s 2019 offense was productive and very much improved the final nine games of the season.

There.

The truth is out there.

That truth, by the way, was stomped on hours after the

’19 season ended because the unit that produced those solid results and got better was almost immediately dismantled.

Offensive coordinator

Chad O’Shea was fired about 12 hours after Miami’s charter flight home from the season finale landed. Soon players on one-year contracts, many of them starters, would be discarded. Eventually the Dolphins would retool with new offensive starters at six spots, which would grow to seven when quarterback Tua Tagovailoa was promoted.

And yet, that fired, discarded, dismantled offense averaged 24.4 points per game the final nine games of 2019.

Those guys — not good enough though they were early in the season — more than doubled their point production from the first seven games when Miami was 0-7 to the final nine games when Miami finished 5-4.

And that brings us to 2020. Chan Gailey is the new offensive coordinator.

Soon enough, Dolphins fans, you won’t have Adam Gase to kick around anymore.

For five years, Gase has been a flash point locally.

Beloved when he arrived in 2016 and won right away.

Cursed when things went against him the next two seasons.

Loathed and mocked in New York ever since.

Sunday in North Jersey will probably be the last time Gase — who by all accounts is nearing the end of his short time with the

Four of five starters on the offensive line are new.

The running back corps has been revamped.

And, yes, the quarterback job was transferred to Tagovailoa four games ago.

And guess what? These guys are starting to mirror the work of last year’s offense.

This more-talented group scored 129 offensive points the first seven games of the season for an 18.4 points per game average. That’s not good, but better than last year’s 11 points per game early in the season.

And in the past three games, or right where the final nine games of the season began, this offense is averaging 23 offensive points per game. That’s 1.4 points per game less than last year’s offense over the final nine games.

So as the season has advanced, this offensive unit also has raised its scoring by a notable degree. And these guys did it while also making a quarterback change from a veteran in his 16th NFL season to a rookie.

No, the Dolphins’ current offense has not arrived. Twenty-three points per game is still a bottomthird points average in a league where the top-10 offenses average 28 points per game and higher.

But this Dolphins offense is at least showing some improvement. It’s seemingly pointed in the general right direction.

“The problem right now is that it’s sporadic,” Gailey said. “We go to Arizona, we play pretty good. We come out the next week, we play average. We don’t play good at all this past week. We are inconsistent.

“There are some improvements, but we’ve got to get better at keeping people off balance. That’s a part of what I’ve got to do is keeping them off balance.

“We’ve got to continue to grow with the people that we have. We’ve got to continue to work with those guys and get them in a position to be successful.”

All true. And all imperative if the Dolphins are going to enjoy the same kind of season-closing surge with this more talented group compared to last year’s.

But there is reason for optimism.

It’s obvious the scoring average for the past three games is a small sample size of what will happen through the end of this season. But who sees, for example, Tagovailoa getting as he plays more?

I don’t. He doesn’t. “I think the way I feel about my performance is there’s always things that I can continue to get better at, and I think that’s day in and day out, every day of the week,” Tagovailoa said. “And how you do that is you continue to get the reps that you need in practice.

“You get more games under your belt and just being able to play in these tough games and whatnot. That’s really how you can get better at those things.”

We pause here for a little reality: Tagovailoa get better with experience so the only thing that can sidetrack him is an injury. He has been on the injury report the past two weeks — first with a foot injury and now with a left thumb injury that makes him questionable for Sunday’s game at the New York Jets.

That raises the possibility Tagovailoa, for whatever reason, has to miss time either this week or in the future.

Well, in that case the Dolphins go back to Ryan Fitzpatrick who started the season’s first six games.

Is that going to produce fewer points? Or would that at the very least produce just as many points?

It can be argued this offense’s needed end-ofseason improvement is immune from a quarterback change caused by whatever reason.

The offense improved late last year under Fitzpatrick. It has begun that same journey with Tagovailoa as the starter. And if Fitzpatrick has to take over again, why wouldn’t he at least pick up where he left off?

But, make no mistake, improvement is the key.

Because the rise last year’s unit made, particularly in the passing game, will be hard to replicate.

Consider that in the final nine games last season, the Dolphins produced the following passing numbers:

Miami had 351 passing yards against Philadelphia.

Miami had 406 passing yards against Cincinnati.

Miami had 326 passing yards against New

England.

This year’s Dolphins haven’t come close to those gaudy numbers with Tagovailoa. His best passing day so far was at Arizona where the team had 221 passing yards. The past two weeks have been somewhat unspectacular with the Dolphins passing for 169 yards against the Chargers and 167 yards against Denver.

You want the optimistic viewpoint? Because this year’s offense can include up to five starting rookies — Tagovailoa, Salvon Ahmed, Solomon Kindley, Austin Jackson and Robert Hunt — the room for growth late in the season is much wider than, say, for veterans.

So this unit is in position to at least match the 24.4 points per game last year’s offense authored the final nine games.

That, by the way, is part of the culture coach Brian Flores is trying to establish. He wants players performing better later in the year than they did earlier because that speaks to their hard work and the coaching staff’s successful development of talent.

But for whatever reason Flores this week was lukewarm on addressing the possibility his 2020 team is showing signs of improvement like his 2019 team did.

“Last year was last year,” he said. “We just take things one day at a time and try to make improvements. I think we’ve seen that over the course of the year, but again, what happened last week or two weeks ago or the first 10 games of the season, that doesn’t matter either.

“We just have to get better on a daily basis. That’s the message every day. For everyone here, players, coaches, sports staff, I think if we try to take care of that, focus on that, hopefully the results take care of themselves.”