Every superhero has an origin story. Every triumph begins somewhere.

And in the case of the Miami Dolphins rebuild, a turnaround from annual mediocrity and disappointment to legitimate playoff contention, it all started with the most unusual of elements.

The origin story of the Miami Dolphins in the 21st century revolves around an offensive tackle, a bong, and a madman.

Truth is stranger than fiction, my friends.

It all started five years ago, just before the 2016 NFL Draft. Before the Rams were on the clock with the first overall pick, a video surfaced on Laremy Tunsil’s Twitter account. The video showed the former Ole Miss offensive tackle wearing a gas mask, inhaling some sort of smoke (I’ll let you connect the dots here). Projected at one point to go in the first few draft picks, Tunsil tumbled down draft boards. Millions of dollars went up in smoke the further he fell from where he’d been projected.

Before long, the top ten picks passed, and Tunsil was still on the board. Then at the thirteenth pick of the draft, the Miami Dolphins were on the clock. Eyeing Tunsil as an incredible value considering his free-fall from the top few picks, Miami scooped him up and never looked back.

It’s probably no coincidence the Dolphins story began here with the 13th pick, the great Dan Marino’s number, but that’s a story for another time.

Tunsil went on to have a respectable first few years in Miami, starting 44 games in the first three years of his career and showing great promise at tackle. Then, in 2019, Bill O’Brien came calling.

With O’Brien as general manager, the Texans had just wrapped a relatively successful 2018 season that saw them rack up ten wins and advance to the playoffs. The Colts bounced them in the Wild Card round, but optimism was present in Houston, especially with Deshaun Watson under center as their quarterback of the future. O’Brien must have felt that the team was close, very close, to winning a Super Bowl—they just needed to shore up the offensive line in front of Watson.

In August of 2019, O’Brian made the Dolphins an offer for Laremy Tunsil they couldn’t refuse. Giving away Tunsil and wide receiver Kenny Stills, Miami got two first-round and two second-round picks in return.

It was, in a word, a blockbuster.

[pickup_prop id=”5786″]

The Texans got their missing piece, and the Dolphins netted some serious draft assets to build for the future. After finishing 7-9 and firing head coach Adam Gase, Dolphins owner Stephen Ross decided that the franchise was done with mediocrity, with doing the same thing over and over each offseason. Ross hired Brian Flores as head coach, Chris Grier as general manager, and tore everything down. The entire team was stripped down to almost nothing, and Tunsil’s departure was a massive part of that endeavor.

Ross blew it all up, tired of relying on aging free-agent signings and a roster that was maybe good enough to make the playoff but never bad enough to earn a high draft pick. Suddenly, the Dolphins were the youngest team in the NFL by a wide margin.

The plot twist was that the Texans, who were supposed to be Super Bowl contenders after the Tunsil trade, never made it that far. Seemingly driven mad by how close Houston was to capturing a title while never getting it done, Bill O’Brien made a flurry of moves to try and get his team over the hump. One of those moves was the inexplicable decision to send DeAndre Hopkins packing in a trade.

Long story short, the Texans imploded, and their madman GM was fired. They won only four games in 2020, earning the third overall pick in the draft.

The only problem?

That pick, among others, now belonged to the Dolphins, who in the second year of their rebuild managed an astounding 10-6 record while just narrowly missing out on a postseason berth. With the third overall pick in their back pocket in addition to their own first-rounder at pick 18, Miami was sitting pretty heading into the 2021 NFL Draft in April.

Then on March 26, a month before the draft, the Dolphins took every mock draft that had been made in the past eleven months and stuffed them into the incinerator. They made a deal to trade back to the 12th overall pick with the Niners, then moved back up from twelve to the 6th overall pick with the Eagles.

It was a dizzying couple minutes in the football world, but when the trade shook out, the Dolphins had essentially turned that 3rd overall pick from the Tunsil trade into the 6th overall pick, a 3rd-rounder, a 5th-rounder, and a 2023 first-rounder. On top of that, the team has an additional second-rounder this year and the players it drafted last year in the first set of picks it acquired from the Texans.

It’s hard to follow, I know. But know this: The Dolphins, primarily thanks to the busy phone line leading to general manager Chris Grier’s office, managed to turn Laremy Tunsil and Kenny Stills into a boatload of draft picks. All while being ahead of schedule on the rebuild and looking ready to compete for the AFC East in Brian Flores’ third year as head coach.

If one era of Dolphins football ended when Dan Marino retired, another one started when the Dolphins selected Laremy Tunsil at the 13th overall pick in 2016.

It’s impossible to know what the next few years hold for the Miami Dolphins, as Chris Grier will have to hit some of his new picks to make sure the team stays on track. But for now, after finishing 10-6 in 2020 with rookie QB Tua Tagovailoa, optimism abounds in South Florida.

Should this story end in a triumph like it seems destined to, we’ll know where it all started: With an offensive tackle, a bong, and a madman.