WesternNYDolfan
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A little article I found that might talk some of you off the ledge if we don't fire Philbin today:
[h=2]Phorget Phiring Philbin[/h] London was the site of a long-rumored administrative bloodletting on Sunday. Two of the Premier League’s 20 managers lost their jobs, with Sunderland’s Dick Advocaat quitting hours before the news broke of Brendan Rodgers’s dismissal by Liverpool. A third boss will be relieved that he wasn’t added to the list. Dolphins head coach Joe Philbin’s job appears to be on the chopping block after a dismal start to the season, and the calls for his head only grew after Miami joined most of the West Coast in sleeping through a brutal 27-14 shellacking by the Jets in England.
If a head coach should be fired after four games, it’s fair to say that Philbin would be that coach. The loss to the Jets wasn’t exactly a one-off. Miami’s playoff aspirations are in tatters after a 1-3 start, one that has included consecutive division no-shows against the Bills and Jets. FiveThirtyEight’s simulation leaves the Dolphins with just a 5 percent chance of making the postseason when it was expected that Philbin needed to make the playoffs to save his job. So why shouldn’t the Dolphins fire their embattled head coach after lying down at Wembley?
Well, what if it doesn’t make things any better? I’m not convinced that Philbin is doing much right for the Dolphins, but I’m also not convinced that firing him is going to solve the myriad problems with this football team, at least not at this point in the season. If anything, given how dysfunctional they appear to be, getting rid of the small amount of continuity the Dolphins have with their head coach might actually make things worse.
When I wrote about the Dolphins during Brink Week this past August, I spelled out the concerns about how thin Miami was on defense and how important it was for the few stars the Dolphins had to stay healthy, given the incredible lack of depth behind them. It was a problem the Dolphins reinforced by clearing out cap space this offseason to sign superstar defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh, who promised to give Miami another All-Pro-caliber player but prevented it from signing multiple contributors to plug holes around the defense.
Shortly after the article was published, Dolphins safety Louis Delmas tore his ACL, ending his season in August. It was the first in a series of problems. Delmas was replaced by Walt Aikens, who promptly became one of the worst regular defensive backs in the league in 2015. He has now ceded most of his playing time to special-teamer Michael Thomas, who played 96 defensive snaps last season. If you’ve never heard of these guys, it’s not a coincidence; this is what the back half of Miami’s roster looks like.
Next, it was star pass-rusher Cameron Wake. Wake suffered a hamstring injury during the Week 1 win over Washington and hasn’t been the same player since, in terms of both workload and effectiveness. He has been a situational player ever since the injury and has yet to record a sack in 2015, with just one quarterback knockdown.
As Wake’s effectiveness has gone missing, so has the concept of a Miami pass rush. The Dolphins have just one sack in four games (from Jordan Phillips), and Olivier Vernon is the only Dolphins defender to knock down a quarterback as frequently as two times this season. Suh, who had 8.5 sacks and 20 knockdowns last season, has just one hit in 2015. Teams have been able to double- and triple-team him all season without needing to be worried about Miami’s edge-rushers beating their tackles one-on-one.
Without any sort of pass rush, defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle attempted to manufacture one against Fitzpatrick and the Jets on Sunday. He sent blitzers on only 30.3 percent of New York’s dropbacks on Sunday, and while that generated pressure, it failed to produce even a single sack. Despite this strategy, the Dolphins were still susceptible to power runs; see Chris Ivory’s 29-carry, 166-yard day for proof of that.
Brent Grimes hasn’t been his usual self this season and was beaten by Brandon Marshall for a 58-yard gain on the opening drive, but even a disappointing Grimes would be Miami’s best cornerback by leaps and bounds. If he’s out for any length of time, the Dolphins would be running out one of the worst secondaries in recent memory after their upcoming bye.
Miami is also a thin team on offense, and it’s having similar issues on that side of the football. The Dolphins badly miss left tackle Branden Albert, who has missed the past two games with a hamstring injury. Their guards have struggled mightily, especially right guard Jamil Douglas, a fourth-round project forced into action as a rookie. The line has exhibited serious communication issues that have led to blown protections, like the one that ended with Muhammad Wilkerson running free at Ryan Tannehill for a sack yesterday. And first-round pick DeVante Parker still isn’t right after foot surgery, having played just 59 snaps through three weeks before going targetless on Sunday.
This is all a consequence of the way Miami built its roster under Jeff Ireland and subsequently under the current regime of general manager Dennis Hickey and football operations VP Mike Tannenbaum. The Dolphins have taken a stars-and-scrubs approach to their roster construction, a byproduct of their love for signing free agents and their struggles to draft well in years past. Right now, their stars are all injured or ineffective. It’s Philbin’s job to develop the few draft picks and journeymen he gets into worthwhile contributors, but he isn’t exactly getting to work with a series of Ted Thompson draft classes in Miami.
The Dolphins can’t change their roster-building model overnight. They can start this offseason, but it won’t be easy, given that Suh’s cap hit jumps from $6.1 million to $28.6 million.[SUP]2[/SUP] They definitely can’t start here in October, given what little flexibility they have and what little there is to work with on any plausible trade market. They could inquire about out-of-favor players like Browns linebacker Barkevious Mingo or Buccaneers cornerback Alterraun Verner, but even those moves would take away valuable picks the Dolphins need to keep in order to draft cheap talent in the years to come.
And with that roster so thin, what good is firing Philbin going to do right now? Whoever the Dolphins would bring in isn’t going to know the players Miami has or the schemes it’s been preparing with all season. The new coaches would be putting out fires and installing a vanilla game plan for the first few weeks; is there any reason to think Philbin can’t do that already?
It’s unclear who would even be a logical successor to Philbin, given how the Dolphins have been struggling. There’s no obvious head-coaching candidate on staff, especially with offensive coordinator Bill Lazor struggling to piece together even a competent unit around Tannehill. The Dolphins can’t afford to erode their quarterback’s confidence, given how he’s signed to a deal that guarantees him significant new money next year. The game situations and struggles along the offensive line have led Lazor to virtually abandon the run, with Miami averaging a league-low 16.3 rush attempts per game. The struggles with the running game and an inability to keep Tannehill upright have left Miami’s offense in far too many third-and-longs, which it’s been expectedly unable to navigate. The Dolphins are converting just 26.9 percent of their third downs so far this year, the third-worst figure in the league.
In midseason, it’s also virtually impossible to find someone who can revamp a team’s schemes the way the Dolphins need to. Tannenbaum can’t hire anybody off of an NFL staff in midseason, which eliminates many of the top viable candidates as a future Dolphins head coach. He can hire somebody who doesn’t currently have a job, but that person would be coming in as a lame-duck interim coach for a team riddled with injuries, out of depth, and without any ability to install a coaching staff or many new concepts. Does that sound like the sort of job that would entice a big-name coach? And if for some reason it did, why wouldn’t that coach wait until the end of the season to try to take over, when those sorts of personnel decisions are more likely to come with meaningful power?
That leaves the Dolphins without any good options. Even if they think Philbin has no future or no hope of making the playoffs, there’s nobody Tannenbaum can hire today who would make them significantly better before 2016. And if that’s true, the only purpose a firing would serve would be to try to light a spark under the team, which might work over the next week or two without offering anything in the way of even a vaguely long-term solution and could very well set the team back even further.
Instead, it’s more plausible that the Dolphins start making preparations for these moves in the days to come. They can’t really fire Philbin, but they can get a head start on the staff rebuilding project by firing defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle, whose unit has seemed a step slow and a moment behind virtually all season. There’s no obvious replacement for Coyle on staff, either, but it’s easier to envision a defensive position coach stepping up to coordinator than it is to imagine one of Miami’s assistants stepping right in as a head coach. The Dolphins are overloaded with problems, and Philbin is one of them, but getting rid of him isn’t inherently a solution, either
[h=2]Phorget Phiring Philbin[/h] London was the site of a long-rumored administrative bloodletting on Sunday. Two of the Premier League’s 20 managers lost their jobs, with Sunderland’s Dick Advocaat quitting hours before the news broke of Brendan Rodgers’s dismissal by Liverpool. A third boss will be relieved that he wasn’t added to the list. Dolphins head coach Joe Philbin’s job appears to be on the chopping block after a dismal start to the season, and the calls for his head only grew after Miami joined most of the West Coast in sleeping through a brutal 27-14 shellacking by the Jets in England.
If a head coach should be fired after four games, it’s fair to say that Philbin would be that coach. The loss to the Jets wasn’t exactly a one-off. Miami’s playoff aspirations are in tatters after a 1-3 start, one that has included consecutive division no-shows against the Bills and Jets. FiveThirtyEight’s simulation leaves the Dolphins with just a 5 percent chance of making the postseason when it was expected that Philbin needed to make the playoffs to save his job. So why shouldn’t the Dolphins fire their embattled head coach after lying down at Wembley?
Well, what if it doesn’t make things any better? I’m not convinced that Philbin is doing much right for the Dolphins, but I’m also not convinced that firing him is going to solve the myriad problems with this football team, at least not at this point in the season. If anything, given how dysfunctional they appear to be, getting rid of the small amount of continuity the Dolphins have with their head coach might actually make things worse.
When I wrote about the Dolphins during Brink Week this past August, I spelled out the concerns about how thin Miami was on defense and how important it was for the few stars the Dolphins had to stay healthy, given the incredible lack of depth behind them. It was a problem the Dolphins reinforced by clearing out cap space this offseason to sign superstar defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh, who promised to give Miami another All-Pro-caliber player but prevented it from signing multiple contributors to plug holes around the defense.
Shortly after the article was published, Dolphins safety Louis Delmas tore his ACL, ending his season in August. It was the first in a series of problems. Delmas was replaced by Walt Aikens, who promptly became one of the worst regular defensive backs in the league in 2015. He has now ceded most of his playing time to special-teamer Michael Thomas, who played 96 defensive snaps last season. If you’ve never heard of these guys, it’s not a coincidence; this is what the back half of Miami’s roster looks like.
Next, it was star pass-rusher Cameron Wake. Wake suffered a hamstring injury during the Week 1 win over Washington and hasn’t been the same player since, in terms of both workload and effectiveness. He has been a situational player ever since the injury and has yet to record a sack in 2015, with just one quarterback knockdown.
As Wake’s effectiveness has gone missing, so has the concept of a Miami pass rush. The Dolphins have just one sack in four games (from Jordan Phillips), and Olivier Vernon is the only Dolphins defender to knock down a quarterback as frequently as two times this season. Suh, who had 8.5 sacks and 20 knockdowns last season, has just one hit in 2015. Teams have been able to double- and triple-team him all season without needing to be worried about Miami’s edge-rushers beating their tackles one-on-one.
Without any sort of pass rush, defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle attempted to manufacture one against Fitzpatrick and the Jets on Sunday. He sent blitzers on only 30.3 percent of New York’s dropbacks on Sunday, and while that generated pressure, it failed to produce even a single sack. Despite this strategy, the Dolphins were still susceptible to power runs; see Chris Ivory’s 29-carry, 166-yard day for proof of that.
Brent Grimes hasn’t been his usual self this season and was beaten by Brandon Marshall for a 58-yard gain on the opening drive, but even a disappointing Grimes would be Miami’s best cornerback by leaps and bounds. If he’s out for any length of time, the Dolphins would be running out one of the worst secondaries in recent memory after their upcoming bye.
Miami is also a thin team on offense, and it’s having similar issues on that side of the football. The Dolphins badly miss left tackle Branden Albert, who has missed the past two games with a hamstring injury. Their guards have struggled mightily, especially right guard Jamil Douglas, a fourth-round project forced into action as a rookie. The line has exhibited serious communication issues that have led to blown protections, like the one that ended with Muhammad Wilkerson running free at Ryan Tannehill for a sack yesterday. And first-round pick DeVante Parker still isn’t right after foot surgery, having played just 59 snaps through three weeks before going targetless on Sunday.
This is all a consequence of the way Miami built its roster under Jeff Ireland and subsequently under the current regime of general manager Dennis Hickey and football operations VP Mike Tannenbaum. The Dolphins have taken a stars-and-scrubs approach to their roster construction, a byproduct of their love for signing free agents and their struggles to draft well in years past. Right now, their stars are all injured or ineffective. It’s Philbin’s job to develop the few draft picks and journeymen he gets into worthwhile contributors, but he isn’t exactly getting to work with a series of Ted Thompson draft classes in Miami.
The Dolphins can’t change their roster-building model overnight. They can start this offseason, but it won’t be easy, given that Suh’s cap hit jumps from $6.1 million to $28.6 million.[SUP]2[/SUP] They definitely can’t start here in October, given what little flexibility they have and what little there is to work with on any plausible trade market. They could inquire about out-of-favor players like Browns linebacker Barkevious Mingo or Buccaneers cornerback Alterraun Verner, but even those moves would take away valuable picks the Dolphins need to keep in order to draft cheap talent in the years to come.
And with that roster so thin, what good is firing Philbin going to do right now? Whoever the Dolphins would bring in isn’t going to know the players Miami has or the schemes it’s been preparing with all season. The new coaches would be putting out fires and installing a vanilla game plan for the first few weeks; is there any reason to think Philbin can’t do that already?
It’s unclear who would even be a logical successor to Philbin, given how the Dolphins have been struggling. There’s no obvious head-coaching candidate on staff, especially with offensive coordinator Bill Lazor struggling to piece together even a competent unit around Tannehill. The Dolphins can’t afford to erode their quarterback’s confidence, given how he’s signed to a deal that guarantees him significant new money next year. The game situations and struggles along the offensive line have led Lazor to virtually abandon the run, with Miami averaging a league-low 16.3 rush attempts per game. The struggles with the running game and an inability to keep Tannehill upright have left Miami’s offense in far too many third-and-longs, which it’s been expectedly unable to navigate. The Dolphins are converting just 26.9 percent of their third downs so far this year, the third-worst figure in the league.
In midseason, it’s also virtually impossible to find someone who can revamp a team’s schemes the way the Dolphins need to. Tannenbaum can’t hire anybody off of an NFL staff in midseason, which eliminates many of the top viable candidates as a future Dolphins head coach. He can hire somebody who doesn’t currently have a job, but that person would be coming in as a lame-duck interim coach for a team riddled with injuries, out of depth, and without any ability to install a coaching staff or many new concepts. Does that sound like the sort of job that would entice a big-name coach? And if for some reason it did, why wouldn’t that coach wait until the end of the season to try to take over, when those sorts of personnel decisions are more likely to come with meaningful power?
That leaves the Dolphins without any good options. Even if they think Philbin has no future or no hope of making the playoffs, there’s nobody Tannenbaum can hire today who would make them significantly better before 2016. And if that’s true, the only purpose a firing would serve would be to try to light a spark under the team, which might work over the next week or two without offering anything in the way of even a vaguely long-term solution and could very well set the team back even further.
Instead, it’s more plausible that the Dolphins start making preparations for these moves in the days to come. They can’t really fire Philbin, but they can get a head start on the staff rebuilding project by firing defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle, whose unit has seemed a step slow and a moment behind virtually all season. There’s no obvious replacement for Coyle on staff, either, but it’s easier to envision a defensive position coach stepping up to coordinator than it is to imagine one of Miami’s assistants stepping right in as a head coach. The Dolphins are overloaded with problems, and Philbin is one of them, but getting rid of him isn’t inherently a solution, either
