Christensen takes fall for Gase’s failures
DAVIE — Clyde Christensen is losing his job over all the bad plays he didn’t call.
Christensen was the Dolphins’ offensive coordinator the past two seasons to help Adam Gase in his first NFL head-coaching gig. Now he’s out as Gase turns to Dowell Loggains to replace him after Miami spent another year in the bottom 10 of the league in total offense.
Who’s to blame for all the “garbage offense,” to use Gase’s term, South Florida has endured the past two years? Not Christensen.
Gase runs the offense,
something 11 other head coaches do, and he’s relied on Christensen mostly as an adviser. Gase calls the plays and works directly with the quarterbacks.
He recruited Christensen at least in part because he had almost four decades experience coaching offense, including 20 with the Buccaneers and Colts. At 61, he’s also more than 20 years older than Gase. That’s an extremely helpful resource — if you’re somehow able to secure it.
It’s hard to picture many coaches with his résumé wanting to take a job like this, one in which the head coach was intent on maintaining total control. Christensen seemed to embrace the role of getting Gase’s career off and running.
When asked recently to clarify his responsibil- ity on the staff, Christensen described it as “giving him some ideas and kind of manage the things underneath him, talk through some things like ‘How do we get this thing back on track?’ so he can focus on calling the game.”
He continued, “It’s the same as it’s always been, just to be a complement to him. It’s his show, and I’m just dancing in it.”
That’s not Christensen being snarky, by the way. That was something he said
very humbly and supportively in a news conference when Miami’s offense was at its worst.
A funny story emerged in the preseason when the wide receivers began complaining that Christensen threw the ball too hard during their warmup drills. That prompted some good chuckles, but also this question: Why was the offensive coordinator doing a job that could’ve been handled by an intern?
“We’ve got about four quarterback whisperers here, so I just moved over to the receivers,” he said, making a joke that really wasn’t a joke. When asked about Jay Cutler’s performance at one point this season, he deferred by saying, “I’ll let Coach deal with that just because he’s kind of handling him.”
It gets hard to see where Christensen is at fault.
Gase and Christensen’s dynamic has come across like a father-son relationship, an image that traces back to the days Gase and Sean McVay and a bunch of the league’s other up-and-coming offensive minds would huddle around Christensen at the NFL combine like he was their grandpa.
“We’d all be sitting in the end zone, and there’d be Clyde Christensen,” Gase said. “And there’d be like a herd of all these guys in their mid-20s sitting around him listening to Peyton Manning stories.”
Christensen backed Gase at every turn, no matter how bad things looked when he opened his career with a 1-4 start or this season when his offense managed two touchdowns in the first three games. After being shut out by the Saints in London, there was Christensen counseling Gase in a corridor at Wembley Stadium.
If Christensen doesn’t remain on staff, or if he’s marginalized to the point that he’s no longer part of the inner circle, Gase will miss that voice. He’d benefit from keeping Christensen close, but that could be awkward after replacing him.
The man replacing him, Loggains, is 37 years old, spent exactly one season working with Gase and was the offensive coordinator of a Bears team that averaged 16.5 points per game last year (he had a rookie quarterback, to be fair). He was looking for work because Chicago fired coach John Fox last week.
It takes a lot of faith in Gase to believe this is the move that’s going to get Miami’s offense rolling, which is something people down here have craved more than anything. It’s not just that the Dolphins are perpetually mediocre, it’s that they’re boring. They haven’t had a top-10 offense since 2001.
Since Gase took over the Dolphins, they’ve scored the ninth-fewest points, gained the sixth-fewest yards, committed the seventh-most turnovers, posted the second-worst third-down conversion rate and ranked 18th in passer rating. Something definitely needs to change.
He’s surely feeling the pressure of turning that around, especially afterr going 6-10 this year. That sets the stage for a pivotal — and tense — upcoming season. He’d better be right that Loggains is the one to help him navigate it.