Marino makes time to meet Luck
The Dolphins didn’t just tip their toe into the quarterback market at this week’s Senior Bowl.
They cannon-balled off the high dive. Proof? Big-armed Missouri quarterback Drew Lock barely had time to get settled in here before the Dolphins summoned him to their cavernous suite for an interview.
The room was packed with roughly a dozen team employees — which is impressive, considering Miami technically doesn’t yet have a coaching staff.
But it appears that Brian Flores, the Dolphins’ next coach, sent a more than capable proxy — one who caught Lock completely off-guard.
“I was shaking everybody’s hand, and then was like, ‘Who’s that? Oh my god, that’s Dan Marino,’ ” Lock told Miami reporters Monday during his first media availability of the week. “When I’m sitting in the chair, he’s back here [behind me] when I’m answering questions. You feel it. You really feel a presence in the room.”
You would think that a meeting between Marino, perhaps the best pure passer in NFL history, and Lock, the self-anointed No. 1 quarterback in this year’s class, would be heavy on football strategy and X’s and O’s.
But not so, at least on this day.
“They were more drilling me,” Lock said. “Drilling me about, ‘Did you get in trouble?’ All that stuff. ‘Tell me about you as a player. What’s your background like?’
Lock, who returned for his senior season at Missouri despite leading the nation with a conferencerecord 44 touchdown passes in 2017, knows that the Dolphins are a team in flux. And he said Monday that he’s completely on-board with a rebuild.
“I think that would be great,” Lock said. “With [Ryan] Tannehill there, however they would like to play that out. Whether they’d bring me there, have me learn a little bit behind him or see how OTAs go and all the minicamps go. I think it would be an awesome spot, as would pretty much any NFL team be an awesome spot.
“But Miami would be really nice. I asked them how easy it is to get acclimated to Miami. They said: ‘It depends on the person. Are you going to be OK getting acclimated?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll be fine.’ ”
‘SLAM-DUNK HIRE’
Flores was not just a good choice as the Dolphins’ next head coach.
He’s “a slam-dunk hire,” says a former Patriots scout who has known Flores for his entire NFL career.
These days, Jim Nagy runs the Senior Bowl, an All-Star showcase game held in Mobile every January.
But a decade and a half ago, Nagy was an area scout for the Patriots, working alongside Flores in New England’s front office. They won a Super Bowl together in 2004. And although it has been years since they wore the same logo, Flores still has no better professional reference than Nagy, who gushed about his longtime friend Monday.
“He’s one of my favorite people that I’ve ever worked with or ever been around in my life,” Nagy said. “… I love Brian Flores. He’s going to be a great coach.” Why? “He’s got a great way about him,” Nagy said. “He connects with all different kinds of people. He was in scouting with us when I was in New England. That’s where we made our connection. He understands the personnel side of it. He’s been a grunt on the personnel side. He’s going to be easy to work with for Chris Grier and those guys.
“That head coach-GM relationship is so critical. He gets that. There’s no ego with Brian. With where he’s come from in life.”
Flores is the son of Honduran immigrants who used football to escape his rough childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn.
“I told my son the other day when word was breaking that ‘Flo’ was going to get that job — he’s been to our house, he’s been around my family — I said, ‘Look at Mr. Brian, at what you can with your life. He doesn’t come from a whole lot now. And now he’s going to be an NFL head coach. It’s pretty remarkable,’ ” Nagy said. “He’s got a great way with people. He’s a great teacher. The players respect him. I think younger coaches nowadays, there’s that fine line of being a player’s coach and trying to be one of the boys, to be one of the guys. A lot of guys cross that and they lost respect. Brian will never cross that line. I think it’s a slam-dunk hire for Miami.”