Ready for the reboot?
Tannenbaum, Dolphins must fix own mistakes again
Today’s question: Did trading Jarvis Landry make sense for the Miami Dolphins?
Today’s answer: Keep up, Ndamukong Suh’s future is on the menu now.
Yes, if you understand why the Dolphins don’t want to pay a great slot receiver $16 million a year, you also understand why they might not pay a great defensive tackle $17 million.
What’s harder to grasp is how the Dolphins keep reaching this situation with players, much less how they improve without their two best players from last season. And this gets to where we really are with the Dolphins, which is with Mike Tannenbaum at center stage.
Raise your hand if you trust the team’s vice president of football operations to invest smartly and judge wisely considering the roster hasn’t improved over his three seasons? Anyone? Say this, too: The Landry trade was the expected first step this offseason. It really was. The modest return from Cleveland of a fourth-round pick this draft and seventhrounder in 2019 was as much as you could expect considering the dollars involved.
You can accept they didn’t
want to overpay Landry at a position that demands more discipline than talent. But why did they overpay average-at-best players like Kiko Alonso and Andre Branch last season?
You can also grasp why they wouldn’t want to pay Suh, their one great player, that $17 million this year. But isn’t that exactly what they paid non-descript cornerback Byron Maxwell for 15 games — less than one full season?
Throw in good money wasted the last couple of seasons on Mario Williams, Jordan Cameron, Julius Thomas and Lawrence Timmons, and you get the hullabaloo over having sudden fiscal discipline with your top players.
Suh becomes the frontand-center question in the next few days now. Like Landry, he was reported to be headed out of town last season (by The NFL Network). Like Landry, the Suh report was loudly denounced by the Dolphins. And now, like Landry, Suh might be headed out of town.
Is it a contract shakedown? Probably. Will the Dolphins release him without a downsizing? Maybe. Would Suh prefer being free to pick another team? We could find that out, too.
The argument against Suh is the Dolphins could have that $17 million to spend this offseason. That’s the argument made for not spending money on tight end Charles Clay a few years ago. They ended up spending the same amount Cameron and Thomas.
Right now, everything’s on the table with the Dolphins. Suh. Center Mike Pouncey. They also have invested richly in four defensive ends after trading for Robert Quinn, a good player with health concerns and a healthy contract.
Do they need four defensive ends? Is another move coming considering all the needs at linebacker, tight end, the offensive line and, yes, slot receiver.
That doesn’t even get into the centerpiece question of quarterback. Coach Adam Gase is very loud in his backing of Ryan Tannehill, and the Dolphins are very public in their inspection of Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield.
So they’re either doing due diligence with Mayfield, going hard after him or it’s entirely a smokescreen. Only they know at this point. We’re in the Cone of Deception for team’s moves.
Add it all up and it’s another March where the Dolphins look to make a lot of headlines. That’s always fun. That will lead to a cycle of hope in May through August. It’s also led to despair by most Decembers, too.
It wasn’t too long ago that Rick Spielman and Jeff Ireland made all kinds of bumbling decisions in the Dolphins front office. Spielman is in Minnesota and Ireland in New Orleans now and their ideas work. They look smart.
It would be nice if Tannenbaum’s ideas worked and he looked smart as a Dolphin. There are a lot of moving parts this offseason, too. Sit back. Put your feet up. Bring some popcorn. The coming days are often more fun to watch than the season.