ESPN is the Favre/Lebron James/Tom Brady/Yankees channel. That's all they talk about because most of their reporters are horribly biased.
If there's one thing I hate more than anything else, it's ignorance. To say Miami won the divison by luck is a very ignorant thing to say. Luck exists in sports, but not for the entire season. For an example, the QB attempts to pass the ball to the WR, but the CB catches it and then drops it. That's luck.
The Bills collapse wasn't even a collapse. They were a decent team that had little momentum beating on bad teams. The Jets collapse was because of Favre's injury, turnovers, and bad coaching. The Patriots lost players to injury including Tom Brady, but they still went 11-5. These things have nothing to do with luck. Coaching cost the Bills and Jets, while the Patriots had the injury bug in 2008. Miami had the injury bug in 2007, but that's no excuse.
Then people say, "you used a gimmick offense in every game to beat teams." Wrong again! If you look at the stats, our base offense was far more used and produced far more yards. Pennington threw for over 3,653 yards in 2008. In the Wildcat, he was never included, except for that flea flicker in the Texans game. So in our base offense, Pennington had a great year.
This why the Dolphins won the divison in 2008:
1.) Chad Pennington- Without him, we would have not won 11 games. The offense was built for a smart accurate player like himself.
2.) An underrated passing game that made big plays. The WR's corp did lack TD's, but we were 10th in the league in passing. We were better than 22 other teams in the league in passing.
3.) Low Turnovers- Miami broke the record with the lowest turnovers ever in NFL history. We did not shoot ourselves in the foot.
4.) A bend, but don't break D- Miami's D was push around a lot last year, but once a team got to the endzone, the Fins played elite D and prevented the TD.
5.) Joey Porter- Best LB in the AFC with 17.5 sacks. He made big plays all year long.
6.) Wildcat- Eventhough we only used it 10% of the time, it made teams prepare for it and they kind of ignored our base offense. It's a distraction. Teams think we are going to do it, but then we use the base offense and run over them or torch them.
7.) Tom Brady- With Brady, the team would have probably gone 12-4 and won the divison. However, an injury is no excuse. Injuries happen all the time in sports, that's why teams have depth to back the starters up. Cassel played just as good as Brady. So really that No Brady excuse dosen't make sense. Well Miami had an injured O-line and WR's in against the Ravens in the playoffs, which is why we had 5 turnovers. I guess we are excused as well.
8.) Solid Running Game- Nothing spectacular, but very solid. We dominated T.O.P. most of the time and we ran out the clock a lot. Ronnie had a pro bowl season and Ricky helped. Cobbs was also impressive.
As you can see, Miami's rival fans are just making excuses. It's like me saying the Pats went 18-1 only becuase all they did was pass the ball in the spread offense. Miami won the divison in 2008 fair and square, so we deserve a little respect. The Media and blind homers are ignorant. Let's look forward to 2009 and stop whining about respect. We'll earn it if we make it to the playoffs again.
