When is Gase going to start calling these players out for bad penalties?
Miami has 143 penalties on the season through 15 games. Only Seattle has more. New England, in case anyone is curious has the 2nd least penalties in the league.
41 of those penalties were pre-snap penalties.
Last season Miami had 158 penalties (46 of them pre-snap), again 2nd most in the league behind only Oakland.
Over 300 penalties in 2 years tells you Gase either doesn't know anything about discipline or just doesn't see penalties as an issue. Miami won't be going anywhere with 150 penalties a year under Gase.
Great point.
There are two successful schools of thought on this one.
A) Be a precise team and let the penalties help tilt the game in your favor when your opponent defeats himself, and
B) Play with strong emotion and channel that to get your players to give their best and create the most dominating version of your team.
I've always been a fan of A, which I always call the Don Shula approach. He was a harsh disciplinarian who required intelligence, rigid attention to detail, numerous repetitions, and exacting precision. His teams were the least penalized almost every year. If any of you recall the Thanksgiving game where it snowed in Dallas, it showed just how Don Shula outcoached Jimmy Johnson and stole a win in Dallas with the entire nation watching. Every Dolphin player was fully aware of the situation and the rules, had practiced following the rolling punt just far enough away from the ball to entice a Dallas player to attempt to jump on it, but just close enough to recover it if it squirted out. Leon Lett, a good player but not the sharpest or most aware of the rules, made a huge game-losing mistake trying to cover that punt, it squirted out, the well coached Dolphins pounced, recovered and ended up winning a game in which they were outperformed on the field. Except ... preparation and precision does matter.
With penalties, many are correctable. But it is which school of thought you choose. Jarvis Landry's penalties are mostly correctable, and he gets a lot for a WR. Wraping himself around the goal post ... yeah, correctable. Headhunting a safety, also correctable. But, if you reign him in too much, you lose his effusive exuberance. You lose his inspirational energy. You lose part of what makes Jarvis Landry great.
Along the OL, we've had a lot of injuries. We had a lot of players playing new positions. Each time a new OL comes in, there's a lot of things to think about, and they are much more likely to commit a pre-snap penalty. As they get adjusted to playing, they are also much more likely to commit a drive-killing holding penalty. The real solutions there are to require higher precision, and if a great athlete can't do it, you replace him with someone who can, or my preferred solution ... fix the dang OL with solid players who are durable and can be precise.
The defensive penalties are mostly choices. Our DL is fully focused on gap penetrating pass rushers ... that was a choice we made long ago and re-make every year. Those guys are going to get offsides penalties, that's just the nature of the quick-twitch approach of gap penetration. We can work on it, but having that hair-trigger release of that coiled up explosion is the basis of our DL scheme. That is fixed by removing aggressiveness, changing to a reactionary DL, or just changing our scheme entirely.
The pass interference penalties are not all that numerous actually. Given that we're trying to play a physical press-man scheme with young CB's, we're not getting an exorbitant amount of pass interference penalties. There is a learning curve, and our young CB's are making it ... but those penalties will never go away given our current scheme. We can and should reduce them, but with so many young CB's, it isn't too surprising.
Yes, there is some sloppiness we need to correct and the coaching staff needs to drill down on those concepts to let the players know it's not acceptable. But honestly, fixing the OL--if that ever gets accomplished--goes a long way to reducing that egregious penalty number. And by next year we should have closure on the Landry situation, so either those penalties disappear or we double-down on embracing his passion.
