I’ve covered my fair share of bad — better yet — dysfunctional Miami Dolphins teams the past two decades.My first season was Cam Cameron’s 1-15 campaign in 2007, where the players basically had a mutiny on their incompetent head coach.My point, I’m well versed on train wrecks, teams with leadership voids, and franchises riding the mediocrity merry-go-round.
But this Dolphins season, this team, this journey is foreign to me.
I’m not familiar with championship talk.
I’ve covered winning seasons (Brian Flores produced two), and playoff seasons (Tony Sparano and Adam Gase did that) before.
But there’s a mystique about Mike McDaniel’s 2023 squad, which has featured the NFL’s best offense for the majority of this season, and presently owns a defense that ranks seventh in the NFL heading into Monday night’s game against the Tennessee Titans.
This isn’t your same old Dolphins.
Solid leadership is critical
This Dolphins team has a linear focus — Super Bowl or bust mentality — and has had it since the offseason.
At first I thought everyone was crazy openly talking about Super Bowl aspirations.
I’ve FINALLY started to believe because this Dolphins team takes care of their business, no matter what that business is.
“The growth has come from a daily buy-in and a daily focus of being our best individually and then that obviously leads to team success and that’s being better each and every day, each and every game,” said defensive tackle Christian Wilkins, who is one of a half-dozen players having a career season. “We still haven’t played our best game yet.”
And Wilkins is right. Not even Miami’s 50-point win over Denver was a clean performance.
These Dolphins are aware of the narratives that surround them — Miami can’t beat a good team, Miami is too finesse — and embrace them head on.
They have good coaching and, more importantly, good leadership.
From Tua Tagovailoa’s humility, to Tyreek Hill’s arrogance, and Raheem Mostert’s competitive spirit.
There’s Terron Armstead’s stabilizing presence, Wilkins’ nastiness, and Jalen Ramsey’s resilience and confidence.
Keeping egos in check
This team has ego, but they contain it for the greater good of the on-field product. And that’s the beauty of what I’m witnessing.
Putting team first isn’t a struggle for these Dolphins, and Jaylen Waddle’s quiet season is a perfect example of this.
“I do understand as a competitor, he wants to be in the mix with Reek, continuing to make plays for the team, and sometimes he does have big games but it is sort of minimized because of the production that Tyreek gives our offense,” Tagovailoa said about Waddle recently. “But I think highly of Jaylen and he’s going to continue to do things that we need him to do to help us win games down the stretch.
“Go watch what kind of player he is in the blocking game. Very physical. He doesn’t really come up to me and tell me, ‘Dude, throw me the ball.’ He just understands when my opportunity is here, I’m going to make sure I make use of all of that.”
The Dolphins have a good locker room, a locker room that lifts one another up. It’s also one that challenges each other to raise the bar.
I’ve never covered a team like this. They are special, and it’s starting to make me believe in the Super Bowl talk, especially if the road through the AFC has to go through Hard Rock Stadium, where the Dolphins have won 17 of the past 19 home games heading into tonight’s contest.
It seems like this team has been curated, and I think McDaniel’s experiences as a ball boy for the Denver Broncos teams that won championships in 1997 and 1998 encoded into his DNA what a good locker room, a Super Bowl winning organization should look and feel like.
“This team has the capability to be better,” cornerback Jalen Ramsey said, comparing the 2023 Dolphins to the 2021 Los Angeles Rams team he was on that won Super Bowl LVI.
“Just look at it on paper and who we had on the roster in L.A. then and you put this Miami team on paper and look at our roster, and there’s a lot of similarities,” Ramsey said. “We have to go game-by-game, week-by-week, day-by-day really, because if you get caught up in all that, you’re going to get lost and there’s no need for that. You have to keep growing every day. But yeah, we definitely have the capabilities of [winning a Super Bowl]. We have to put that work in
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