I got inspired to write this after reading Omar Kelly’s article in the Miami Herald about how people should blame this current regime with head coach Mike McDaniel and general manager Chris Grier for the reason the Miami Dolphins haven’t won a playoff game in 25 years. It’s been a long time since I saw my favorite team win a playoff game.
It was December 30, 2000, the last time the Dolphins won a playoff game in a thrilling 23-17 overtime win over the Indianapolis Colts. Most people felt the Dolphins would lose that game, but they scratched and clawed back from 14-0 down to win in overtime.
It was the team’s 3rd straight year they had won a playoff game but couldn’t get past the second round. The Dolphins were a young team and had a very good defense, but they could never get over the hump or do good things after that season. I wasn’t 21 years old yet when they won a playoff game.
It’s been a frustrating 25 years with a lot of pain and disappointment. When you think the team has something going, they always break your heart for whatever reason. The question that has been asked is why this once proud franchise has been unable to win a playoff game or be relevant for 25 years.Â
In my mind, it started after the 1999 season, when Jimmy Johnson and Dan Marino both retired.
The Dolphins had a head coach in waiting in Dave Wannstedt, who came to the team the year before as an assistant head coach, and he was close to Johnson, having worked together at the University of Miami and later the Dallas Cowboys. Then owner the late Wayne Huizenga hired Wannstedt after Johnson left instead of opening the search for a new head coach. Wannstedt was a good coach, and in his first season, the team went 11-5 and won the AFC East.
I had the problem that he had the final say on all football decisions, and that was his problem with his previous head coaching job with the Chicago Bears in the mid-1990s. The game was slowly turning into a passing league with the St. Louis Rams’ greatest show on turf. The Colts, led by Peyton Manning, were a well-oiled passing machine, and others were coming. The problem was Wannstedt failed to see that and was stuck in his win with defense and a running game.
After the 2000 season, things started to go downhill. It also didn’t help that the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2000 with a great defense and running game with little passing attack to score points, which probably reiterated to Wannstedt how to win.Â
Wannstedt had a defense with two future Hall of Famers in Jason Taylor and Zach Thomas as well as two of the best corners in the game at the time in Sam Madison and Patrick Surtain. These players were in the prime of their careers, but on offense, there wasn’t much, and that’s what Wannstedt needed to do: find players on offense. In the 2001 draft, the Dolphins had the 26th pick in the draft, and quarterback Drew Brees was there to be the potential franchise quarterback.
Still, Wannstedt took cornerback Jamar Fletcher instead, despite having Madison and Surtain in the prime of their careers and locked in on long-term contracts. The Dolphins’ director of scouting, Tom Bratz, pleaded for Brees to be picked because the Dolphins hadn’t been in a position to take a quarterback in years, but Wannstedt ignored Bratz.
Bratz resigned right after the draft because Wannstedt didn’t take his input seriously. The Dolphins had Jay Fiedler at quarterback, and while he won the playoff game in 2000, he wasn’t a franchise quarterback, and Wannstedt didn’t think you needed a franchise quarterback. To his credit, Fiedler won more regular season games than any quarterback from 2000-2003, but his limitations as a quarterback hurt the team in the end. The Dolphins didn’t have many game-changing players at wide receivers either.
The Dolphins had OJ McDuffie, but a toe ended his career after the 2000 season. They drafted Chris Chambers and added players like James McKnight and Oronde Gadsden, but they were decent players and not game-changing players. In 2003, Wannstedt needed a wide receiver in the 2nd round, and Anquan Boldin was there to be taken, but he took linebacker Eddie Moore, who never played a down with the Dolphins. Wannstedt’s stubbornness to upgrade the offense hurt the team.
The defense was stingy, but at the end of the coming seasons, they wore down because the offense couldn’t score a lot of points with an average passing game. Wannstedt did upgrade the running game with Ricky Williams in 2002 and 2003.
Still, he bailed on the Dolphins right before the 2004 season to smoke marijuana, and his body was beaten up from the pounding he took from carrying the ball a lot with no support of a passing game to take the pressure off of him. Wannstedt traded two 1st round picks for Williams, and it came back to bite him in 2004, and things fell apart.Â
While things did start with Wannstedt, one of the other big reasons the Dolphins have been irrelevant is that they didn’t have a plan at quarterback when Marino retired. Dolphins fans, including myself, got spoiled by Dan Marino and his talent, but he left the Dolphins and failed to find a franchise quarterback and, in some cases, failed to have the vision to go get one when they could have.
It started with passing on Brees in the 2001 draft, but the Dolphins that year could have made a move for Green Bay Packers back up Matt Hasselbeck and instead passed. Wannstedt then commented, “What has Matt Hasselbeck done that Jay Fiedler hasn’t?” Well, Hasselbeck became a good quarterback and helped lead the Seattle Seahawks to the Super Bowl in 2005.
The Dolphins could have signed Brad Johnson that year as well. In 2004, the Dolphins made an aggressive move and traded a second-round pick to the Philadelphia Eagles for quarterback AJ Feely, but he was clearly not a starting-caliber quarterback. Then, in the 2005 and 2008 drafts, the Dolphins had a chance to take Aaron Rodgers and Matt Ryan but passed on both, and those guys were franchise quarterbacks for years.Â
The Dolphins got outfoxed by the Baltimore Ravens later in the 2008 draft, when the Dolphins were going to take quarterback Joe Flacco in the top of the second round in that draft, but the Ravens took him in the first round instead, and the Dolphins settled for Chad Henne instead. Flacco went on to win a Super Bowl with the Ravens, while the Dolphins stuck with Henne, but he never developed into the player they hoped. The Dolphins in 2012 took Ryan Tannehill with their 1st round pick, and he was a decent starting quarterback, but clearly not a franchise quarterback.
The Dolphins gave him a contract extension after his rookie deal but hung on to him too long. The Dolphins had a chance to move up and get a quarterback in 2018 as they had the 11th pick. They could have moved up to get Josh Allen and have him be Tannehill’s replacement, but instead, the Dolphins stood pat and let the Buffalo Bills move ahead of them and take him. That lack of vision at quarterback has hurt this team time and time again over the years. They also could have taken Lamar Jackson in the draft at 11 but chose not to, and the Ravens ended up trading back into the 1st round to take him.
The Dolphins did take Tua Tagovailoa in the 2020 draft and he has led the team to back-to-back playoff appearances, but the jury is still out if he can get the team over the hump. He has durability concerns, and the Dolphins already paid him after his rookie contract, just like Tannehill, and time will tell if they must move on. The quarterback position is where everything starts in the NFL, and if you don’t have that, then you are only going to go so far.Â
The Dolphins also had a chance to get Brees again as a free agent in 2006, but he tore his labrum in his throwing shoulder in the final game of the 2005 season and then coach Nick Saban deferred to the doctors, who wouldn’t pass him on the physical so Saban passed and pivoted to Daunte Culpepper, who also was coming off a serious knee injury, but the doctors passed him.
We all know what happened: Brees went on to win a Super Bowl in Miami’s stadium in 2009 with the New Orleans Saints- what a kick in the you-know-what for us fans- and played 15 seasons, while Culpepper struggled, and his career flamed out. The Dolphins gave up a 2nd round pick for Culpepper and got nothing to show for it. They also missed out on Brees for a 2nd time.
However, what fans didn’t realize until a couple of years ago was that Brees had a degenerative shoulder from that injury in 2005, and doctors couldn’t predict when he would have no use of his arm. It didn’t happen until a couple of years ago when Brees revealed that he could no longer lift his shoulder above his arm. Brees was on borrowed time as a player, and he made the most of it.
In hindsight, it is 20/20, but the reality is that Saban had the final say on the decision to sign him and chose to go with the doctor. It’s too little too late, but if fans knew about this, they would have had a better understanding of the reason. However, that’s in the past, and the Dolphins got burned, and the Saints benefitted.Â
The Dolphins have also had too many changes at head coach and general manager. Whenever you have changes like that constantly, those guys are going to want to change the roster with players they want and most of the times guys they inherit they don’t want. After Wannstedt was stripped of his personnel power, the Dolphins hired Rick Speilman as the GM and kept Wannstedt, but the Dolphins fell apart in 2004, and Huizenga hired Saban as the new head coach and gave him the final say on football decisions, which meant Speilman was basically done. Saban did hire Randy Muller as his GM, but he had the final say. After a disappointing 2006 season, Saban left for Alabama, and the rest is history.
Huizenga kept Muller as GM and opened the coaching search and they hired Cam Cameron. Then, after a 1-15 season, Huizenga brought in Bill Parcells to run the football operations, and that meant another regime change. Muller and Cameron were let go, Jeff Ireland was brought in as GM, and Tony Sparano was brought in as head coach.
This 3-4 period should have been handled differently by Huizenga. He let his football people make the decisions and spent money to know the expense on players, but he should have fired Wannstedt after 2003 and either hired an outsider as GM or went along with Speilman and had him help hire a new head coach. I would have done that, but Huizenga hated firing people and was loyal to a fault.Â
Parcells and his crew helped turn around the Dolphins in one season, going from 1-15 to 11-5, with the team winning the division that year, but unfortunately, they couldn’t keep the momentum going as they had back-to-back 7-9 seasons. This was also a time when Huizenga sold the team to Stephen Ross, and Parcells had an out in his contract. He could have left and still gotten paid, so he left in 2010. After the 2010 season, Ross tried to hire Jim Harbaugh as head coach when Sparano was still the head coach.
On top of that, Ireland flew out with Ross for an interview and that caused a rift between Ireland and Sparano when word got out about the meeting. Both guys didn’t speak to each other in 2011, and Sparano was eventually fired. The Dolphins then hired Joe Philbin as head coach in 2012, but in 2013, he and Ireland had a rift, and Ross fired Ireland, so a new GM was to be hired.
However, Ross had a problem with hiring a new GM because he offered the job to at least three candidates, and they wanted to hire their own coach rather than inherit Philbin. Ross declined and hired someone who was willing to work with Philbin in Dennis Hickey in 2014. However, after an 8-8 season, Ross Mike Tannenbaum became Vice President of Football operations, and he undermined Hickey’s authority and Hickey and he left shortly after the 2015 draft. Philbin was fired during the 2015 season, and the Dolphins were set for yet another regime change.
I think Ross screwed up in 2013 and should have just let Philbin because it was clear that he wasn’t fit as a head coach. He didn’t have the players’ respect, and he wasn’t a good leader. The general managers offered the job; they obviously knew that, but Ross didn’t want to hear it. The Dolphins promoted Chris Grier to GM, who only had the final say in the draft, and hired Adam Gase as head coach. The Dolphins in 2016 got off to a 1-4 start but ended the season at 10-6 and made the playoffs as a wild card team.
Once again, just like in 2008, the Dolphins couldn’t keep that momentum going and followed it up with a 6-10 and then 7-9 seasons. Ross decided to clean and fired Tannenbaum and Gase but decided to retain Grier as GM and gave him full control. The Dolphins hired Brian Flores, and the Dolphins went through a total rebuild and finished just shy of the playoffs in 2020 and 2021, but there was tension between Flores and the organization, and he was fired.
The Dolphins then hired McDaniel, and he brought in an exciting offensive structure not seen since the Marino days. The Dolphins made the playoffs in 2022 and 2023 but failed to win a playoff game. The Dolphins had their most talented team in years in 2023 and were 9-3 going into December, had a 3-game lead in the division, and had a chance to get the number 1 seed in the playoffs, but they choked the division title away to the hated Bills in the final game of the season. The Dolphins had a disappointing 8-9 season last year, and if they have another disappointing season, it could lead to another regime change.Â
The way the roster looks sounds familiar, right? Some of the Dolphins coaches they have hired, like Philbin, Cameron, and Gase, were clueless coaches. The best coach they have had was Flores, in my mind, because the team was well-disciplined and prepared week in and week out. The problem with him was not getting along with the organization.Â
These aren’t necessarily all the reasons the Dolphins have been irrelevant for the last 25 years, but a root of a lot of this team’s problems is related to a majority of this.
Sadly, this once proud franchise has had a drought this long with no playoff victories. It might stay the same until some of these things change, and it’s sad as a fan to say that. I feel like this year will be another disappointing season, and we will have a new GM and head coach next year. Then the roster will get reset, and who knows if we will get these things right. Â
I hope I am wrong, but given the current situation, what makes me think it’s going to change? Â
