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What If...?

coalesce

coalesce

Dolphin Fan since 1974
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I've been watching a lot of the 1987-1993 games on YouTube and I always thought to myself: if they didn't have all those significant injuries, how far would the team have gone? Not that I expected them to be in the Super Bowl hunt every one of those years, but look at the people who they lost for significant periods of time: Hugh Green, Troy Stradford, John Bosa, Dwight Stephenson, John Offerdahl multiple times, and finally Dan Marino in 1993. That's a lot of quality players and two Hall of Famers on that list. Fundamentally, I still don't think they would've gotten past Buffalo in the early 90s, but if the Dolphins would've had their full compliment of players during that time, they would've made the games a lot less one sided than they turned out to be.
 
They did get the AFC Championship game at home in 1992 so they were close. However, Shula stuck with Olivadotti as DC for way too long. The Dolphins would not have won a SB during the Chuck Studley and then Tom Olivadotti eras.

With such a weak running game and terrible defense in the late '80's/early '90's, it just shows how great Marino was to make the Dolphins a contender during those years.
 
BrowardDolfan said:
They did get the AFC Championship game at home in 1992 so they were close. However, Shula stuck with Olivadotti as DC for way too long. The Dolphins would not have won a SB during the Chuck Studley and then Tom Olivadotti eras.

With such a weak running game and terrible defense in the late '80's/early '90's, it just shows how great Marino was to make the Dolphins a contender during those years.
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Shula's loyalty to Olivadatti was detrimental to this teams success.
 
Highzenga said:
Maybe if we would’ve signed Deion in 1994 https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1994-08-21-9408210174-story.html
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Deon had a couple of chances to sign with us. I thought we had him set as even his mom....or grandmother said she wanted him here....it was before he signed with the 49ers....it might sound dumb because it was family, not him saying it, but the way the media was portraying it all it really seemed like he was going to play for the Dolphins.
 
Olivadotti should have gone but at the time I had no clue (i know i know.....still don't), but as far as run game, I think Marino was never going to have a great run game save putting barry sanders back there, and even then i'm not sure. Marino has told us countless times he wanted to throw the damn ball and Shula was smart enough to let him. Mark Higgs probably deserves more credit for doing what he did -not a ton, but i remember he existed at least.
 
If you ever want to REALLY see why Dan never had any help... go back through those drafts following the '83 draft when we got him.

We just kept drafting LBs, DEs, and RBs... that were lousy. Shipp, Brophy, Bosa, Kumerow, Graf... ugh. Many times, we got better players in the 8th and 10th rounds than at the top.

Just years worth of flailing around and taking the wrong kind of players. We continually drafted for Defense and got bupkis... just awful.
 
Fortunately I am one of those individuals who only look to the future and doesn’t worry about the past. There is nothing that can be done to change the past and therefore wondering what could have been is rather senseless to me.

I appreciate the joy and even the disappointments the Dolphins have given me since 1966 but for now, I just look forward to the 2022 season because there is absolutely nothing I do to change what happened in the past.
 
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