RB coach Danny Barrett has been fired

[Austin Tatious]

We hope to see improvement, you mean? :)

Point taken that I’m hoping. But I’m also projecting. As John Lennon said “it can’t get much worse” to Paul McCartney’s line “it’s getting better all the time.”

But, seriously, we all saw how many mistakes the Dolphins made last season, from missed coverages, to missed blocking assignments, to penalties, etc. I cannot sit here with a straight face and pretend to know what the position coaches were teaching the players, but we saw the bottom line of high frequency of errors.

I don’t have the time to do it, but if we charted each drive, I think you’d see a recklessly high number of drives that were self-sabotaged by mistakes. I’m talking about a drive where you hit on a couple of plays, you’re on the move and boom, Pouncey or Tunsil or James held, or they didn’t block the right guy or there was an asinine penalty. So, now you’ve got second and twenty or third and seventeen. On defense, I doubt it was as bad, but there would be, say, Tank in one coverage and everyone else in something else, and boom, somebody got loose for a thirty yard gain. Or you’d have them dead to rights and a mental error gave them new life and they ended up scoring. If we charted every mental error and noted how many drives were spoiled, then compare the possible delta in points with the final score, I think that’s the biggest reason for the failed season. Every team in every game will have some degree of this but for the Dolphins it was a way of life.

I’ve been an unabashed Gase supporter and I still stand by that. I’d say, if we saw the number of drives that were ruined by undisciplined play, there’s your answer. It’s not necessarily scheming or play calling that jumps out at me. We saw a number of nice opportunities where the coaches dialed up the perfect move, and boom, there’d be a missed execution.

So, the next counter is that it’s Gase’s job to fix the undisciplined play, which has been a problem for two years and cannot be chalked up to coincidences. Enough data is in to say it’s a reflection of who this team is, and how it’s been coached up. I agree completely. But, that’s my point. We’ve dumped position coaches at positions where the play needs to be cleaned up. I would actually be ticked off if we didn’t make the staff changes because I’m tired of watching mistake-filled players.

While we definitely need an improved roster, with better athleticism, just cleaning up mistakes will go a long way. The Patriots are the poster children for showing what can be done if you just play sound.

In a sense, it’s good it happened last year, so the need for the fixes would be so painfully obvious. This team wasn’t going to do anything with Cutler.

It may be contrarian, but the Dolphins have a great opportunity to right the ship for the long haul. I think we are at an inflection point, and we can go up from here and stay up. Obviously, this will require the right personnel moves, but the opportunity is sitting there.

 

[Wildbill3]

@ckparrothead has an interesting take on this



While Ajayi and Drake certainly developed under Barrett its definatly fair to say the rbs made frustrating mistakes over the last couple of years.

Ajayi in particular seemed to freelance a lot and I detested his inability to just take the easy 3 yards when they were there for the taking.

But still... he did good work with drake this year

Could also be Drake is a smart player and excelled despite mediocre coaching