I'll expand a bit even though it shouldn't be necessary since my themes don't change. Jay Ajayi was Dolphins' MVP in 2016, as the team made the playoffs for the first time since 2008. Last summer Ajayi was proposed as a league MVP candidate for 2017 in an article by NFL.com. There were Tannehill quotes in that article regarding Ajayi returning from California early to work on pass routes with Tannehill, and asking questions throughout the process so he knows what Tannehill is thinking on each type of route.
http://dolphinswire.usatoday.com/20...y-ajayi-selected-as-mvp-candidate-by-nfl-com/
Ryan Tannehill is not a great quarterback, someone who can sit back there and disregard all the league norms while throwing 31 times in the first half, as Brady did on Saturday. Tannehill benefits immensely from snaps under center and play action threat. I think that has been a consensus around here. I've certainly posted it countless times, including that we need a relatively high number of rushing attempts to aid Tannehill. Jay Ajayi was the first back who enabled that type of thing. He was young and had that swagger athletic arrogance, the type of ferocity that dictated the late going in both Bills games last season along with the Steelers game and other contests. It was the first time in years that I had an inner glee that we could line up and dictate with a running back, whether or not the opponent knew it was coming or not.
Somehow that is gone less than two months into the 2017 regular season. Not only is Jay Ajayi shipped away, but he's a locker room cancer, he won't follow his blockers, he's a liability in the passing game, his knees are shot to the point he won't be in the league much longer anyway. I'm sure I left something out. What were the other knocks on Ajayi? Certainly a handful more.
No, I don't respect that type of thinking. It avalanches against everything I believe in, everything that is logical. The foundational aspects are light years more significant than frantically overreacting to recency.
Instead of a wide scope view that it can't be good practice to trade away a young MVP running back for a late fourth rounder, we wait and react to whatever Drake (or whomever) did in Ajayi's place. Since he had many impressive wiggly runs of his own, we happily disregard Jay Ajayi and rationalize that the trade was necessary in Dolphin land, and now all is well.
That is a losing philosophy. It doesn't matter what Drake did. Just like it didn't matter what the Dolphins did with that first round pick in 2004. Once you give away a fourth round pick in panic to move up one spot with the Vikings, your mindset is on collective tilt. If you retain the caliber of thinking that was responsible for the Ajayi trade, you will fail.
Maybe Rick Spielman got over that trade later. Maybe he wouldn't do it now. I saw poker players who improved with age and experience, and likewise sports bettors. Adam Gase has many troubling tendencies right now. The desperation to hold onto his own players is not a positive. And this recent jettisoning of one assistant coach after another is just like the Ajayi situation. Almost identical. Every time I read that another name is gone it's like the panic to make sure to list yet another reason Ajayi had to be shipped away. It couldn't be two. It has to be five or six.
Adam Gase is an arrogant young guy who I still support. Apparently he had no clue that 2016 wasn't fully legitimate, even though everything pointed in that direction, like the point differential and YPPA Differential and all the bizarre unlikely rallies. Right now he's midstream in frantically making one change after another, to soothe himself. Jay Ajayi just happened to be the first one. We didn't know it at the time.
It will pay off for Gase if we stumble upon some legitimately great players. That has been the stumbling block all along.
