The 2024 Miami Dolphins were a disappointment. There’s really no other way to put it: after a season in 2023 of highlights and fighting for the number 1 seed in the AFC, 2024’s 8-9 record left fans with a sour taste in their mouths.
The success that the team experienced during the early part of the season made them a marquee match-up for their opponents, ensuring that every team would deliver their best shot in order to defeat the team once dubbed “The Greatest Show on Surf.”
The Dolphins were a team lacking in experience, especially when it came to expectations. The expectations from the fans was at least another winning season if not a playoff win. Mike McDaniel recently appeared on Pro Football Talk hosted by Mike Florio and Chris Sims to address those expectations and the Dolphins failure to meet them. One quote stood out to me above the others in the nearly nine minute segment.
“There was a lot of targets on our back, and guys got to feel it and that’s a healthy experience in the national football league,” McDaniel said. “Because you don’t play good football without being able to excel in those situations. A confluence of stuff to me, makes me excited about 2025 because I don’t have to sell to the players where we have to make gains. They’re coming to me in that way, I think that gives us a chance to do our nonnegotiable formula for successful football and that is complete commitment across the board from the offseason program on. Then you’ll get the results you want and anything short of that will leave you vulnerable to same feeling you have now”
It reminds me of the team’s time on hard knocks, where McDaniel faced down his team and let them know that he wouldn’t want it for them.
As a coach, you can only put the players in the best position to succeed, but the players have to want to succeed on their own. If they are able to be self-motivators, then that will bleed over into their execution, and as a team, they will have success. Miami offers a difficult place to find self motivation, even if work isn’t going well, how upset can you be when you’re living in paradise?
We’re not privy to the conversations that are happening behind closed doors in the Dolphins facility. Still, if McDaniel is to be believed, last season was an embarrassment to the players in much the same way it was embarrassing to the fans. No one wants to be labeled a loser, least of all professional athletes, but the team got to experience what it was like to be, if not losers, at least mediocre. That mediocrity seems to have lit the fire of self-motivation for the players. They’ve experienced the highs of 2023 and then the crushing lows of 2024. But lows offer an opportunity for redemption, if they’re able to take what they experienced last season and use it as motivation then they are set up well to succeed in 2025.
For more sports opinions, you can follow me on YouTube @WickedGoodSports, and for opinions on reality TV, you can follow me on X @TheFakeBMarr
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