Interesting story. Hope he is right.
8. I think there’s one thing that was going to die in my notebook because I never got to it this season, but I decided to include it here under the heading of “Team I Think you Might Be Overlooking for 2024.” The Dolphins. Let me take you back to Frankfurt on Nov. 3. The Dolphins had just finished Friday practice, and coach Mike McDaniel agreed to let me ride back to the team hotel, maybe 25 minutes, with him so we could talk. I wanted to talk about one specific play that interested me. It was a touchdown against Carolina a couple of weeks earlier. Tight end Durham Smythe went in orbit motion (behind the backfield) from left to right of the formation, but instead of completing the motion, Smythe stopped short and at the snap of the ball, moved forward to block a linebacker near the line of scrimmage. Tua Tagovailoa flipped a short pass to Raheem Mostert, who scored the easiest touchdown of his life—because Smythe eliminated the only defender who could have stopped him short of the goal line. I loved the play because I hadn’t seen an orbit-motioner stop in mid-motion and charge ahead to block like that. It was just another way that McDaniel’s imagination invented new stuff on the fly, and it made football fun. So I brought this up to McDaniel in the car, and this was our exchange:
McDaniel: “Do you have cameras in the building?”
Me: “Uh, no. Why?”
McDaniel: “How did you know what it meant? This play represents everything about our team that is special to me. I was sitting on it all training camp. The motion was new. The concept, it was probably the worst success rate that any play has ever had—we were like 0-for-11 on it in practice. The reason why it represents everything special is because the entire time we were working on it, I was waiting for somebody to say, ‘Why are we running this play?’ It kept failing.”
Me: “In other words, nobody was negative about it.”
McDaniel: “No one even took a moment thinking about something that isn’t in their control. They trusted coaches. Nine times out of 10, if a play doesn’t work in the first three attempts, people throw it out. Either the coaches throw it out or the players say, I don’t wanna run this. But anybody who’s great at anything spends little to no time worrying about things outside of their control. Does Michael Jordan hesitate at the end of a game because he’s 5-for-20 shooting? He does not. Because he’s process-oriented and has conviction and doesn’t worry about anything. The whole reason the offense looks the way it does is because people have bought in across the board. There’s a lot of things that we do that are new that most people don’t wanna try. They’re resistant. They’re not willing to be vulnerable but you have to be vulnerable to be your best self. You have to be secure and… I just think it epitomizes what’s going on. People see the results but they don’t see the fact that since April 17, there hasn’t been one day that our locker room has wasted. It starts with the captains. When you approach every day and every rep with the same amount of intensity, how are you not gonna have results?”
Me: “Why did it fail 11 times?”
McDaniel: “Sometimes the quarterback would miss it. Sometimes the back would be too shallow in relationship to the quarterback’s launch point. Sometimes the blocker would be too far out in front of the halfback. They would throw it, the halfback would catch it, and the blocker would be outside of the halfback. If Durham wasn’t in the right relationship inside out of the back in the timing of the play, he couldn’t execute the block. When it worked, it was all the reps Durham Smythe and Raheem Mostert had in camp. And the eight times that Tua ran it and it didn’t work but he sat there and listened and absorbed all of it.”
Me: “I bet your players were euphoric when they came to the sidelines—all that failure, then it works in a game and helps you win.”
McDaniel: “Not really. That’s another cool point about that moment. When you approach practice with full intentionality, you get used to the natural momentum swings. You don’t get too high or too low. So like, people were happy in the moment and then came to the sidelines and looked at the pictures of the entire drive and moved on with their lives. They trusted the coaches, we trusted them.”
That’s modern football. That’s the brains of the game trusted by the talent of the game. That’s why I think Miami will rebound this year and give Kansas City and Buffalo and Baltimore and whoever a very tough go.
www.nbcsports.com
8. I think there’s one thing that was going to die in my notebook because I never got to it this season, but I decided to include it here under the heading of “Team I Think you Might Be Overlooking for 2024.” The Dolphins. Let me take you back to Frankfurt on Nov. 3. The Dolphins had just finished Friday practice, and coach Mike McDaniel agreed to let me ride back to the team hotel, maybe 25 minutes, with him so we could talk. I wanted to talk about one specific play that interested me. It was a touchdown against Carolina a couple of weeks earlier. Tight end Durham Smythe went in orbit motion (behind the backfield) from left to right of the formation, but instead of completing the motion, Smythe stopped short and at the snap of the ball, moved forward to block a linebacker near the line of scrimmage. Tua Tagovailoa flipped a short pass to Raheem Mostert, who scored the easiest touchdown of his life—because Smythe eliminated the only defender who could have stopped him short of the goal line. I loved the play because I hadn’t seen an orbit-motioner stop in mid-motion and charge ahead to block like that. It was just another way that McDaniel’s imagination invented new stuff on the fly, and it made football fun. So I brought this up to McDaniel in the car, and this was our exchange:
McDaniel: “Do you have cameras in the building?”
Me: “Uh, no. Why?”
McDaniel: “How did you know what it meant? This play represents everything about our team that is special to me. I was sitting on it all training camp. The motion was new. The concept, it was probably the worst success rate that any play has ever had—we were like 0-for-11 on it in practice. The reason why it represents everything special is because the entire time we were working on it, I was waiting for somebody to say, ‘Why are we running this play?’ It kept failing.”
Me: “In other words, nobody was negative about it.”
McDaniel: “No one even took a moment thinking about something that isn’t in their control. They trusted coaches. Nine times out of 10, if a play doesn’t work in the first three attempts, people throw it out. Either the coaches throw it out or the players say, I don’t wanna run this. But anybody who’s great at anything spends little to no time worrying about things outside of their control. Does Michael Jordan hesitate at the end of a game because he’s 5-for-20 shooting? He does not. Because he’s process-oriented and has conviction and doesn’t worry about anything. The whole reason the offense looks the way it does is because people have bought in across the board. There’s a lot of things that we do that are new that most people don’t wanna try. They’re resistant. They’re not willing to be vulnerable but you have to be vulnerable to be your best self. You have to be secure and… I just think it epitomizes what’s going on. People see the results but they don’t see the fact that since April 17, there hasn’t been one day that our locker room has wasted. It starts with the captains. When you approach every day and every rep with the same amount of intensity, how are you not gonna have results?”
Me: “Why did it fail 11 times?”
McDaniel: “Sometimes the quarterback would miss it. Sometimes the back would be too shallow in relationship to the quarterback’s launch point. Sometimes the blocker would be too far out in front of the halfback. They would throw it, the halfback would catch it, and the blocker would be outside of the halfback. If Durham wasn’t in the right relationship inside out of the back in the timing of the play, he couldn’t execute the block. When it worked, it was all the reps Durham Smythe and Raheem Mostert had in camp. And the eight times that Tua ran it and it didn’t work but he sat there and listened and absorbed all of it.”
Me: “I bet your players were euphoric when they came to the sidelines—all that failure, then it works in a game and helps you win.”
McDaniel: “Not really. That’s another cool point about that moment. When you approach practice with full intentionality, you get used to the natural momentum swings. You don’t get too high or too low. So like, people were happy in the moment and then came to the sidelines and looked at the pictures of the entire drive and moved on with their lives. They trusted the coaches, we trusted them.”
That’s modern football. That’s the brains of the game trusted by the talent of the game. That’s why I think Miami will rebound this year and give Kansas City and Buffalo and Baltimore and whoever a very tough go.
FMIA: It's Time. Who's Complaining? Not Me.
www.nbcsports.com
