South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Can this era deliver amid new talent, heightened hope?
Sunday starts a Miami Dolphins season of questions: Can quirky and creative Mike McDaniel succeed as a new head coach? Will Tua Tagovailoa bloom into a franchise quarterback with the addition of surrounding talent, such as receiver Tyreek Hill?
Does a Dolphins defense last seen getting dragged up and down the field by Tennessee grow into something special?
But the one question, the biggest of all before Sunday’s kickoff against the New England Patriots, is simply this: Has a bumbling Dolphins organization stumbled into creating a team capable of winning the franchise’s first playoff game in two decades?
People believe this season. Oh, how they believe. Fans who haven’t seen a playoff win in a football generation put their money where their enthusiasm
is. The club announced it sold out of season tickets and has a waiting list for the first time in team history at the 65,000-seat Hard Rock Stadium.
That might be fudging a little with history, considering the Dolphins had 78,000 season tickets before the 1973 season. But you get the idea. People are pumped for Sunday. You have to be of a certain age to remember the last time the Dolphins entered a season with the hope they could play into the depth of an NFL winter.
Was it when Sports Illustrated picked the Dolphins to win the Super Bowl in Nick Saban’s 2006? When coach Jimmy Johnson had the top-rated defense and an aging Dan Marino in 1998?
Do you have to go all the way back to when Marino returned from a torn Achilles tendon and opened the 1994 season with five touchdown passes against New England?
“Not bad for a guy on one foot,’’ Pats coach Bill Parcells told Marino afterward.
Still, you know what eventually happened after every opener like that. Disappointment happened. The only question for dreary decades hasn’t been if the Dolphins fell short, but by how much to this Sunday’s opponent: New England.
McDaniel is the eighth Dolphins coach to line up against New England coach Bill Belichick. Belichick went a long way to deciding the fate of the previous seven: Dave Wannstedt, Nick Saban, Cam Cameron, Tony Sparano, Joe Philbin, Adam Gase and Brian Flores.
Belichick’s legend is such that he’s not just taking on the next Dolphins coach in McDaniel. He’s only 27 wins from Dolphins legend Don Shula’s all-time wins record, too.
Here’s the good news for McDaniel and all this inflated hope around these Dolphins: They have a better roster than New England this year. Faster playmakers. Richer drafts. Better full-scale team as the oddsmakers say in making the Dolphins a 2 ½-point favorite.
If New England isn’t the measuring stick in the AFC East anymore — that’s the Buffalo Bills’ role now — Sunday’s opener still comes against a backdrop of history. The Patriots, too, made the playoffs last year while the Dolphins again didn’t.
Of course, after being knocked out of the playoffs, New England owner Bob Kraft sounded like a kid spoiled by six Super Bowl rings.
“I’m not happy that we haven’t won a playoff game in three years,’’ he said. “I think about that a lot.”
Is that an epitaphin-waiting lament, like late Dolphins owner Joe Robbie once worrying his organization was “wasting the Marino years?”
There are issues in the Dolphins’ owner booth for the opener, too. It will be empty. Dolphins owner Steve Ross and his consigliere, Bruce Beal, will miss their first game in serving suspensions for tampering — namely, for trying to sign New England’s and then Tampa Bay’s quarterback Tom Brady — while he was under contract with the other teams.
That was just one public stumble for Ross this offseason. The other was former coach Brian Flores naming Ross as a central part in a lawsuit against the NFL. The only way out of all this for Ross is to do something his teams have done little in his 13 years as owner: Win.
Can McDaniel change that? He smartly changed the narrative around Tagovailoa this offseason from questions to optimism, and he changed the tenor inside this team from closed-mouthed to openminded.
McDaniel is the anti-Belichick in portfolio and style, dropping regular jokes in his news conference, like when asked this week about what he looks for in a punter: “He has to be able to kick the ball further than me.”
Patriots quarterback Mac Jones? “He’s a really cool player,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel is really cool, too. But can he win? Can Tua take a mother-may-I step forward? Will Hill bring the electricity into a Sunday like everyone expects?
The answers trickle in over 17 games starting Sunday. The optimism and hope is as tangible as the Dolphins seasonticket list. People are pumped. But they’ve been pumped before. Can this latest new era deliver?