Trending Up: Miami Dolphins
Good News: Great cap situation, front office optimism, quarterback situation, solvable problems.
Bad News: The old Dolphins "cause one problem to solve another" two-step.
Jeff Ireland is gone! Long live New Guy Who is Not Jeff Ireland! (Dennis Hickey.) Ireland committed professional suicide when he battled with coach Joe Philbin and team vice president Dawn Aponte while spending high draft picks and free agent dollars almost completely randomly. But he left a pretty good looking cadaver: The Dolphins came within a middle school crisis intervention between 300-pound professionals of reaching the playoffs, and the roster is scattered with talent. The Dolphins will have about $30 million to spend on free agency, and their top priority -- an offensive line so screwed up that Bryant McKinnie was a stabilizing influence -- comes with its own flashing red beacon. Ryan Tannehill looks like a franchise quarterback whenever he is upright, so fixing the line should fix other problems as well.
The bad news comes from Ireland's brand of creative accounting. The Dolphins have money to spend but lots of in-house free agents to spend it on. Randy Starks and Paul Soliai, veteran stalwarts of the defensive line, are both free agents. So are offensive linemen McKinnie, Tyson Clabo and John Jerry. Most of the offensive linemen are pretty terrible, but the Dolphins must already replace Richie Incognito, and they will spend part of the offseason knocking softly on Jonathan Martin's bedroom door and asking if he feels like talking. A chunk of that $30 million, plus a draft pick or two, will get swallowed by the offensive line. Starks and Soliai will probably get hard-to-match offers from better teams.
The reason the Dolphins hovered around .500 for all of Ireland's tenure is because Ireland's acquisitions never coalesced into a coherent philosophy: Last year's solution was this year's problem; this year's free agent splurge was paid for by a series of troubling free agent departures. Hickey inherits Ireland's final mixed blessing: A big budget and an even bigger shopping list. But with money to spend and a draft class deep in offensive linemen, the Dolphins can assemble 11-win talent just by solving one major problem. That's not enough to challenge the Patriots (at the rate the Dolphins improve and Patriots decline, the two teams are on schedule to switch places in the standings in 2023) but it can push the Jets and Bills into the background for another year and finally get the Dolphins into the playoffs.
