By Dan Le Batard
dlebatard@MiamiHerald.com
The Heat is a huge disappointment for merely getting within two games of the championship. The Marlins, owners of two titles, just spent $191 million to get your attention. Even the Panthers are in first place. It is hard to imagine in a region that has an expressway named after Don Shula and a hospital named after Dan Marino that the once-proud Dolphins are both the least interesting and least competent professional sports franchise in town. Have we ever said that before?
The latest shame is Jeff Fisher, who has all of six winning seasons in 17 years as an NFL head coach, rejecting the Dolphins and Miami’s sunshine to go coach a 2-14 team in St. Louis instead. He is the second coach in two years to not want Shula’s vacated throne after being offered it, which means the Dolphins have had twice as many coaches reject them in the past two years as they’ve had playoff appearances in the past 10. This while the Bengals, Lions and 49ers have been fixed. Read that list again. Usually, when you are as irrelevant as the Dolphins have been for a decade, you get healed even if it is by accident in a league that legislates parity. What the Dolphins have done over the past decade, for the wrong reasons, is as impressive as what the Patriots have.
To understand how that happens — and it is hard to understand — you have to travel back in time a year. Back then, Tony Sparano and Ireland were friends. Their families, too. But then Ross, new to this, not knowing any better, put Ireland in an impossible spot. He made Ireland choose between a new boss or an old friend. Ross wanted to woo Jim Harbaugh. The moment Ross demanded Ireland come along, he did irreparable damage to the relationship between Sparano and Ireland. Even their families stopped speaking after that.
Sparano understandably viewed Ireland, a fellow Bill Parcells Guy, as betraying him. But it isn’t quite that simple. The job Ireland has? There aren’t many of them in the world. Ireland was getting his first shot at it, and sometimes you only get one, especially if there is something as volatile as an ownership change and Parcells has fled the premises with a giant escape-hatch check and your safety net. It’s easy to say blindly, unemotionally, detached, that Ireland’s loyalty should have been to Sparano, but Ireland has four kids, two with special needs. His loyalty is to them, to himself — so he did what the new boss asked, as many of us would have, as Sparano himself might have if put in the same difficult spot.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/15/2590192/how-have-the-miami-dolphins-fallen.html#storylink=cpy
dlebatard@MiamiHerald.com
The Heat is a huge disappointment for merely getting within two games of the championship. The Marlins, owners of two titles, just spent $191 million to get your attention. Even the Panthers are in first place. It is hard to imagine in a region that has an expressway named after Don Shula and a hospital named after Dan Marino that the once-proud Dolphins are both the least interesting and least competent professional sports franchise in town. Have we ever said that before?
The latest shame is Jeff Fisher, who has all of six winning seasons in 17 years as an NFL head coach, rejecting the Dolphins and Miami’s sunshine to go coach a 2-14 team in St. Louis instead. He is the second coach in two years to not want Shula’s vacated throne after being offered it, which means the Dolphins have had twice as many coaches reject them in the past two years as they’ve had playoff appearances in the past 10. This while the Bengals, Lions and 49ers have been fixed. Read that list again. Usually, when you are as irrelevant as the Dolphins have been for a decade, you get healed even if it is by accident in a league that legislates parity. What the Dolphins have done over the past decade, for the wrong reasons, is as impressive as what the Patriots have.
To understand how that happens — and it is hard to understand — you have to travel back in time a year. Back then, Tony Sparano and Ireland were friends. Their families, too. But then Ross, new to this, not knowing any better, put Ireland in an impossible spot. He made Ireland choose between a new boss or an old friend. Ross wanted to woo Jim Harbaugh. The moment Ross demanded Ireland come along, he did irreparable damage to the relationship between Sparano and Ireland. Even their families stopped speaking after that.
Sparano understandably viewed Ireland, a fellow Bill Parcells Guy, as betraying him. But it isn’t quite that simple. The job Ireland has? There aren’t many of them in the world. Ireland was getting his first shot at it, and sometimes you only get one, especially if there is something as volatile as an ownership change and Parcells has fled the premises with a giant escape-hatch check and your safety net. It’s easy to say blindly, unemotionally, detached, that Ireland’s loyalty should have been to Sparano, but Ireland has four kids, two with special needs. His loyalty is to them, to himself — so he did what the new boss asked, as many of us would have, as Sparano himself might have if put in the same difficult spot.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/15/2590192/how-have-the-miami-dolphins-fallen.html#storylink=cpy
