2018 Preseason Week 2 - Game Thoughts | FinHeaven - Miami Dolphins Forums

2018 Preseason Week 2 - Game Thoughts

J. David Wannyheimer

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Something a little closer to real football this week. I hope I'm not too long-winded, but a few things I wanted to get off my chest:

- I feel really bad for everyone in that front office who actually has to listen to Mike Tannenbaum talk and pretend to be interested, engaged, or otherwise appreciative of his thoughts. That might have been the worst five minutes in the history of television.

- No first team injuries. That we know of. GREAT game. Success.

- I dislike this new rule about lowering the helmet. Making the game safer is good, and I approve of it. On plays like the one in the 4th quarter (Durham Smythe getting hit in a helmet shot), I understand it, because it's obvious and indeed it is poor tackling form. But when Maurice Smith got his third quarter interception... you realize that a penalty could easily have been called there on Trae Elston? It's a rule that will be inconsistently applied until the fan complaints become so loud and frequent that they quietly revise it in the off-season.

- Rest in Peace, Tony Sparano. I think you would have loved watching this game; I fist pumped every field goal tonight.


Offense

- PENALTIES. More offensive holding and what should have been two delays of game in a row. The team needs to get the plays in faster, communicate them faster, get lined up faster, and maybe execute them properly, too.

- Miscommunications. Receiver stops and comes back, quarterback throws it to the end zone. Completely missed blocks? Uh... guys? Honestly, it doesn't matter how good of a play-caller Adam Gase is, or how well equipped his offense is to pick apart opposing defenses. If the players are not being taught to execute it properly, it will fail. Illegal formation COMING OUT OF A TIMEOUT SITUATION! That's bad.

- Receivers: Parker, Stills, Amendola, Wilson, Grant, Ford. I can't see any other way that works out.

- Durham Smythe looks pretty good to me. I mean, he looks good running routes. He had a real nice catch, but I also saw him get sneaky wide open a couple of times and just not even get looked at. I think we got something there.

- Bryce Petty: Thank you. That was the best play of the night. I'm going to be honest, I'm with Kdawg on this: I think I'd seriously consider keeping Petty as the backup. Maybe he can pick up the offense enough to actually run it competently, and at that point he's easily the best option of these three. He's got a great arm and he plays with passion. Maybe we could QB whisper ourselves a quality second quarterback. Eh, yeah, who am I kidding? The same reason he's available is the same reason they had to dumb down the playbook at Baylor is the same reason he's going to be cut in two weeks.


Defense

- I missed the first drive for the defense, and I'm glad I did. It's my understanding that both TJ McDonald and Bobby McCain took horrible angles and allowed a run to go for a long touchdown. I'd like to see the play in question so that I can be suitably disappointed by even more Dolphins starters.

- Robert Quinn looked more dangerous this week. Honestly, he looked pretty good. We need to see more of this.

- Charles Harris, Raekwon McMillan and Cordrea Tankersley are all second year players drafted near the top of last year's draft. All three of them were disappointing again tonight. As much as I feel good about the 2018 Dolphins draft class right now, that 2017 class is not looking so hot. Gotta get out there and make some plays. Yeah, everything's vanilla, but I can still see that Harris isn't getting enough pressure, McMillan looks slow and indecisive, and Tankersley is going to want to burn the film of this game.

- This team needs Minkah to be the free safety. If that means rolling the dice on McTyer at CB, trading for a cornerback, or seeing who is out there as a free agent, then so be it.

- The backups got abused. Badly. I'm really concerned about the defense after two weeks of the preseason. I don't care how well these guys are doing in camp, right now the offense at least looks like it can move the football, whereas the defense looks like it's in serious trouble as long as teams figure out not to throw at that Howard guy.


Special Teams

- I was nervous about Jason Sanders, but so far, so good.

- Drew Morgan probably won't get the punt return job. In fact, he probably won't get any kind of job on this team.

- I'm glad Rizzi didn't try for the onside kick at the end of the game. Good way to get someone hurt in a meaningless game, and you'd like to think they will have some new wrinkle to show off when it really matters.


And that's all I got for tonight. Dress rehearsal next week. I sincerely hope we get a better showing for that game.
 
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An actual 100% Tony Lippett might be better than anything we could trade for right now. That is a hard injury for anyone to come back from and especially a CB with fringe speed and quickness as it is.

Totally healthy he can do the job and be an enormous threat to pick off passes; at 95% or less, he is a liability.......depth wouldn't hurt.
 
I thought Harris looked ok. He had one sack and pressured on at least two other pass plays that I recall. I'm still not sure about using him at dt in the speed rush package as they did early tonight. Don't like it when those big guards get two hands on him.
 
Anytime Miami has an offensive holding you might as well expect the drive to end. Miami struggles to get 10 yards with 3 downs let alone more yards than that with less downs. Miami never recovers from penalties.
 
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I'm really concerned about the defense after two weeks of the preseason. I don't care how well these guys are doing in camp, right now the offense at least looks like it can move the football, whereas the defense looks like it's in serious trouble as long as teams figure out not to throw at that Howard guy.

We must have seen two different games. Our starting D got abused on the first drive but did good after that until the backups and 3rd stringers were inserted.
Our offense did OK between the 30s with dink and dunk and some running plays but was not what I would call "moving the ball". We couldn't even punch it in from the 8-yard line.
If I look at our 1st string O and 1st string D I am more concerned about our O right now. But let's wait for the dress rehearsal next week when the Ravens and us game plan.
 
I was extremely displeased with the lack of plays to our TE's in the first half. Gase was insisting on trying to run the ball in the red zone against a team with awesome run stuffing ability and a questionable secondary. It was just senseless.

This team is loaded with TE talent from top to bottom. Even Escobar,Duarte,and Smythe are decent and need to be evaluated. Why run all these plays with Perry up the middle? What does it accomplish? The OL got plenty of run blocking reps with Drake in the first quarter. Totally disagree with the play calling in the red zone.

They should have been identifying one on one situations and exploiting the Panther secondary in the red zone. How many TE targets in the first half? Anybody got that info?
 
We have to be patient with Lippett, it'll take some time but he'll be back and help us out as our CB2 in the future. But in the meantime, we need someone other than McCain in the boundary, cause we absolutely need Minkah to be in at safety. So yeah, I agree that a trade should be considered an option.
 
I'm not sure how fast Ian Thomas is (Panthers rookie TE) but man Raekwon looked so slow trying to chase him down on that touchdown.
 
Miami better wake up and realize that it can’t get away with the combo of Alonso and Baker in base.

There’s a lot more big plays in the run game in our future running right at the strong side backer if they don’t. Carolina just gave you a whiff of it.

Chase Allen needs to start at strong in base 3 lb sets.

McMillans td was a zone crosser. The scary part is he didn’t do a bad job of recognizing it and turning to redirect. But that top end speed and acceleration just looked lacking.

Keep putting it on tape and ocs will dial up ways to get it in space and expose it.

They already know that this team has soft edges on both sides with 2 up field penetrate des and that Alonso and baker pairing on the outside at backer.

If raekwon can’t meet the ball horizontally at the los or run to the perimeter in nickel well this offense better score points to hide it.
 
The run defense gave up 226 yards on 7.3 yards per attempt on the ground and last week gave up 116 on 5.3 yards per attempt. Please sign Hankins.

Our 3rd down defense the last 2 games has allowed 12 of 25 good for 48% conversion rate. The Falcons were 32nd last year with 44%.

This defense worries me a lot. You could most of that is against backups but at some point those backups are going to play when some starters go down with injuries.

The offense is fine...dink and dunk all day long just have to attempt passes over 10 yards if you want to convert those 3rd and longs.

Maybe this is much ado about nothing and none of this matters one single bit because it's preseason, or maybe it matters some.
 
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