David Bowens was the starter until the infamous lightbulb incident.
I could be mistaken, but the infamous lightbulb incident happened last offseason, after Ogunleye had amassed 9.5 sacks in 2002 opposite Jason Taylor.
Here's my memory of what happened: After 2000 when Trace had like 16.5 sacks opposite JT, and subsequently left to Oakland, we entered the 2001 season with just Mixon, Brommell, and Ogunleye to man the LDE position. A little late, we picked up David Bowens, a no-name do-nothing who came to us via Denver and Green Bay where he got into some trouble, spent all his money, got injured, and generally sucked. This was the first season when Wale could have participated (he spent all of 2000 on IR) and there was much speculation about him including fluff pieces about how he would go to the mall and dodge people as a low-impact means of practicing and testing his knee. Then 2001 season came and went, our passrush BLEW, and Ogun was part of that, as he really did nothing. Then came offseason 2002.
After we got rid of both Kenny Mixon and Lorenzo Brommell (failures from 2001) we we going to go with Daryl Gardener at LDE....then we abruptly got rid of him due to disrespecting the coach. We then had a competition at the LDE spot between David Bowens, Jay Williams (newly acquired in trade from Carolina for a 4th round pick in the wake of releasing Gardener), and Adewale Ogunleye. David Bowens was initially winning that competition through mini-camps because he had (has) almost as much athletic ability as Jason Taylor and in agility drills it was always JT + D-Bo, then the rest of the bunch...prompting a few "if the season started today our starting LDE would be David Bowens" statements, which surprised the media because David Bowens was acquired late in the game in 2001 and was just a special teams guy and a bit of a high energy part time player, but overall not worth the 3rd round pick (I believe it was a 3rd) that he was originally drafted at. So the media came out with some stories etc about David Bowens and how he's got the inside track at starting for Miami at LDE etc etc. Then he got hurt...I forget the exact nature of the injury, he just suffered it sometime in training camp I believe. From that point on, Ogunleye sooort of had the inside track until preseason...when Ogunleye promptly announced his presence to the world by sacking Tampa Bay quarterbacks like 5 times, with another 2 or even 3 sacks called back on him either by penalties in the secondary or the play was called a QB run and he gained like half a yard or a foot or something. From that moment on, Ogun held the cards, and during the season he gave us almost a double digit sack performance in his coming out season. David Bowens was lost by the way-side.
Then Ogunleye was an exclusive rights free agent, and due to his near double digit sack performance, he groused about playing for the EFA tender of about $375k or something like that. I can't remember if he held out, but I do know that directly in response to that we gave David Bowens a pretty lucrative contract for a guy who was just a part-time player and special teams ace. Bowens was ready to step up while Ogunleye bytched about his contract. From there, I can't remember the exact ordering of events but Ogunleye caved, and David Bowens got hurt in the infamous light bulb incident (prompting many a "how many dolphins does it take to change a lightbulb" jokes)...and due to Bowens' injury, and both Jay Williams' and Rob Burnett's ability to play inside, Ogun was assured to be in the game as much as Jason Taylor, and he repaid us with 15.5 sacks.
Funny part is if you look at our passrush since 1998 (when Jason Taylor first became a fulltime player at RDE) we've almost always garnered about the same number of sacks (with the exception of 2001, when all-around our passrush sucked) whether the LDE was a bunch of rotating guys or whether it was Ogunleye playing fulltime.
opup: