At some point you've got to be accountable for your gullibility. If anyone thought the Dolphins' off-season represented improvement, the question needs to be asked: Why? Stephen Ross did not sell the team. The front office wasn't swept away. Joe Philbin was not fired. He and most of his assistants were returning for their fourth season. Why would anyone harbor the illusion that things would change? It's clear by the third year of a coach's tenure whether or not he's going to turn it around, it's often apparent by the second season. You see progression in various aspects of the team's preparation, efficiency, discipline, talent and ultimately the results. We've seen none of that year to year with the Dolphins. They're a team with middling talent getting middling results with the same inefficiencies and seeming lack of preparation we witnessed in years 1, 2 and 3. We lost to the Jags and nearly lost to the Redskins, 2 of the worst teams in the NFL and it was simply inexcusable.
But perhaps you were fooled by Suh's free agent signing? At this point it's almost like bashing one's head against a wall in an insane asylum explaining to some of you that big ticket free agency doesn't work. It's always the same thing, a vocal clique of fans advocating the big, splashy free agent signings, like we've been doing since the advent of UFA in the early nineties, then convincing themselves that free agent X is going to put the team over the top, or at least put the offense or defense over the top. It never happens. The best teams don't do what the Dolphins do and its been shown empirically, like trading up in the draft, to be a loser's gambit. It doesn't work and if you know this, then you really had no reason to buy into what the Dolphins did, not because the Dolphins did it, but rather because it's a formula for failure that the best organizations avoid. The best organizations over the long haul: Patriots, Steelers, Ravens, Packers, Colts and even the shorter haul like the Seahawks, lose a lot of good players to free agency, but seldom use free agency for anything but filling out the roster. The Dolphins are perpetually using free agency to compensate for terrible drafting or to make marketing splashes to low information fans attracted to recognizable names. The best organizations are built through the draft, using free agency only when the player represents extreme value or to fill out the roster, but this approach still requires elite coaching and front office management, something this organization hasn't had since the seventies.
