Honest question brother, because I have a great deal of respect for you, but I don't see the risk the same way, and I want to understand your point of view--How are we worse off tanking if that correct coach and GM were not available to us?
Assuming Adam Gase wasn't the answer, we needed a new coach. I did not see the correct coach available this past offseason. Our options were A) continue with Gase, B) hire Flores, C) hire another coach who is not the correct coach. Given those three choices, I do not see any of the three being the right answer and I do not see any of the three being a huge risk … only three bad choices that are temporarily between today's failure and tomorrow's success when we find that coach.
We got rid of the real GM too, Tannenbaum. We kept the best of the three from a talent evaluation standpoint, Grier, and added other well regarded talent evaluators like Reggie McKenzie. IMHO, that's a positive move. If we assume that the correct GM is not available that year, isn't that a net positive? My belief is that this was a decent move, even if Grier & Co. isn't the correct GM, because he was a solid choice of what was available then.
So the question becomes, how much worse off are we with stopgap GM and Coach solutions? My guess is that we are not really worse off unless we fail to hire the correct people when they do become available to us.
The other question becomes, how does tanking hurt us long-term when this GM and Coach are replaced with the correct GM and Coach? To me, it offers a clean slate with more talent.
Are you factoring in the potential loss of fans permanently if we stink up the joint too bad as we are today? Do you see this stench of dysfunctional Dolphins preventing the correct GM and Coach from coming here when they are available? Are you worried about the locker room when the new GM/Coach cleans house and gets rid of 95% of the guys we bring in via our tanking experiment? Is it the bad record we are welcoming in the short term? All good points, and I'm sure you have others, but are any of these things going to endure past the hiring of a new GM and Coach?
I guess I see this as an attempt to jump off the mediocrity treadmill we've been on for so long. We never quite have enough talent to get over the hump--and more importantly, as you've noted, we never had the right Coach. At least the tanking strategy will concentrate more talent on our roster, all things being equal. Hell, even the Barry Switzer led Dallas Cowboys was great for one year with the roster Jimmy Johnson built before he left. I would love to taste that kind of dominating team once again. But we've proven we can't build it through traditional patchwork rebuilding, so I'm game for trying to concentrate our resources via tanking. Help me understand why you see this as a big risk … if the alternative is decades of irrelevance through mediocrity … what's really at risk?