that defence ranking could be misleading the other way too.....they were horrible with that 0 and 7 start and then were great the 2nd half.......sure, we played great teams early on and the 2nd half we played a bunch of bad teams.
Ozzy rules!!
Silly, really. We played a LOT of solid teams under MOORE's leadership, period! That's how I define the last season: pre-MOORE and MOORE-led. And if we had a decent RT or one more solid G, MIAMI i/m/o, would've beaten DALLAS (solid), DENVER (playoffs), the GIANTS (best) and N.E. II. (2nd best team in the League). And, of course, we DID throw the last shovel of dirt on the JETS' grave in JETS II, didn't we? The "D" took some time to "gel". But SO WHAT? It should've been good enough! Ditto, MOORE, who deserved to be 10-2, plain and simple. And to all the *******s who call MOORE a back-up QB, any QB who DESERVED a 10-2 record (even w/all the handicaps that MOORE had to work under), and who was rated the 12th best QB in the freakin' League (like MOORE was), is NO BACK-UP QB.
I like to be fair, and not simply a blind/deaf/dumb "Homey". That includes putting the blame where it belongs. Those 4 teams mentioned above beat a MOORE-led MIAMI by a FG or less. So did CLEVELAND. By my count, COLUMBO by himself cost us 6 or so stalled drives/game, not to mention turnovers like in CLEVELAND and DALLAS (his man hit the QB resulting in a lame duck pass in CLEVELAND, which became a GIFT INT for a player who was totally out of position; and a fumble by MOORE at our 8 Yard Line in DALLAS, after WARE made good 'ol COLUMBO look like a total fool who couldn't even manage to take a "holding" penalty). If we had just ONE more solid G, do you think that MIAMI, even w/CAREY at RT, would've gotten 1 more TD or 2 more FGs out of those 6 or so stalled drives? I DO! That meant 5 more "W"s: 4 under MOORE, and 1 under HENNE.
Last F/A, ROSS got cheap. There were 6 solid Gs out there: I still remember 4 of them! (GALLERY, COLLEDGE, and both of ATLANTA's starting Gs) How many did MIAMI make a serious offer to? NONE! Even though MIAMI's interior OL was a disaster...NONE!!! And when a couple more interior OLmen and OTs became available as the "cuts" were made, how many of THEM did MIAMI make a serious offer to? Yeah, NONE! So MIAMI ends up rummaging thru DALLAS's garbage can---AGAIN---after all the talent is gone, and comes up with...COLUMBO, and that TOTAL FARCE called the CAREY-COLUMBO experiment. What a fiasco, taking a serviceable RT (CAREY) and moving him to G (where he hadn't played since "The U") so that the WORST-rated T in football could start at RT! All because the stupid putz ROSS was all of a sudden too cheap to get his team ONE more solid G, to fix a BIGTIME need that the entire NFL universe could see. Brilliant!!! And now, this preseason, we're all talking about "RT and RG" in our discussions about P MANNING!!!
Real "football people" notice. SPARANO deserved a better fate--he EARNED better. So did MOORE and MIAMI! To paraphrase a famous MARLON BRANDO line, "MIAMI coulda been a CONTENDER: we coulda been SOMEBODY!". If the dumb schmuck ROSS had ANY intellectual honesty, right after he fired SPARANO, he should have FIRED HIMSELF. After all, when he looks in the mirror, he sees the cause of MIAMI's failure last season. And as a postscript to the idiot ROSS, WINNING fills expensive stadium seats and sells overpriced warm beer and greasy hot dogs! NOT some celebrity wiggling her *** and jiggling her hooters.