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Title: Commentary: For starters, Dolphins are underwhelming Post by: DolFan619 on August 10, 2008, 03:08:51 am http://www.palmbeachpost.com/dolphins/content/sports/epaper/2008/08/09/a1b_davsuncol_0810.html
Commentary: For starters, Dolphins are underwhelming By DAVE GEORGE Palm Beach Post Staff Columnist Saturday, August 09, 2008 MIAMI GARDENS — Tony Sparano can't turn the Miami Dolphins around in one pre-season game, as Saturday's 17-6 loss to Tampa Bay demonstrated with thudding certainty. The sense of being overwhelmed, however, seems not even to have occurred to Miami's second consecutive rookie head coach. Why should it, with Bill Parcells on his side? Why should it, when the coach on the other sideline, Tampa Bay's Jon Gruden, is feeling his way through the same August fog, with a fistful of quarterbacks to sort through and one of them, just like Miami, a McCown? "We may keep four quarterbacks," Sparano said, "and that's the truth." Maybe it is, but it's only today's truth. In the long run, Miami needs to get the maximum out of every roster spot. Sparano didn't work a free-agent deal with former New York Jets pest Chad Pennington, a favorite of both Parcells and offensive coordinator Dan Henning, in order to give him more options. The Dolphins plucked Pennington on Friday from the Brett Favre tidal wave of unintended consequences because the team is in need of settling at least one vital leadership role before the regular season comes calling. With the Sparano Era one game old, and one practice game at that, the feeling is that anybody not named Chad had better look out. Rookie Chad Henne seemed to have a strong arm and a strong will in leading his unit to the only scores Miami could manage against the Bucs, two Dan Carpenter field goals. Chad Pennington, meanwhile, has the advantage of location, location, location, or at least that's the way Sparano put it to reporters once somebody figured out the combination lock to the interview room door and let the coach in to his first post-game post-mortem. "Location, from a quarterback's standpoint, is pretty important," Sparano said. "The guy has been a 60-plus percent passer in the league for a long time. Complete passes, you get a chance to stay on the field." Get sacked, as Josh McCown did in fourth-quarter mopup duty with Miami's reserves, and you may not even be the first quarterback hugged by your own parents at game's end. Luke McCown, Josh's brother, started for Tampa Bay and did pretty good, only to step aside and watch his own playing-time rivals, Brian Griese and Chris Simms, do better. This is how it works in the early stages of exhibition season, but John Beck, 5-for-9 Saturday with a fumble and a sack and no points produced, has to feel the clock ticking even more loudly. He has to know that the Dolphins of 2008, and most likely 2009, are going to be about the brutal business of crunching numbers, pre-season, regular season and off-season alike. Sparano is one more facet of this work in progress. He's learning how to be a head coach in this league, and right now that means pushing, always, pushing, if only to find out which buttons work. Tempests were a common sight as Tony paced the sidelines Saturday, wearing a windbreaker and a ballcap on a stifling August night. Twice, Sparano adopted special teams kamikaze mode, barking at rookie punt returner Jayson Foster for a fumble in one case and for waiting too long another time to decide whether to field a ball. Lanky wide receiver Ernest Wilford, a free-agent acquisition who will start by default if nothing else, got an earful from his boss for failing to catch a nice third-down touch pass from Henne. Well, it was more like a shoulderful than an earful, taking the height difference into account, but Sparano surely got his point across. Bottom line, Sparano looks like a guy who can take a punch, just as he took this opening loss in a game that was bound to go straight to video no matter how it was received by an announced crowd of 64,087 sympathetic critics. The crowd cheered loudest for Ricky Williams, who broke off a couple of nice runs and averaged 6.2 yards per carry. Ronnie Brown, coming back from major knee surgery, got a more quiet response for his three quiet carries, but it's possible everybody in the Dolphin Stadium stands was just holding their breath, too. Don't count Sparano in that group, though. He expects more from his defense than staying on the field for possessions lasting 18 and 19 plays. That's what happened Saturday, along with nine Miami penalties. "Not good enough," Sparano told reporters. "We're not going to win a lot of games that way." One would be about the most you could expect, because that's how many the Dolphins won last year with Cam Cameron, a less forceful rookie head coach, in charge. Cam might have looked the part a little more, tall and steady on the sideline, but Tony shouldn't take as long to master the playing of the part. Of course, it's earlier than early, regardless of the acceleration that Pennington's arrival implies. We'll have to take what we can from Sparano's first public showing. The red challenge flag never left Sparano's pocket, for instance, but neither was there a call close enough to gripe. Never did he face a genuine head coaching crisis, go for it or kick, that sort of thing, which might have been instructive, even by the looser guidelines of pre-season. What you saw, though, was a realist at work, with a real feel for what must be done here. "They (Sparano, Parcells and General Manager Jeff Ireland) said it over and over again," Josh McCown said. "They're going to do what they have to do to add to this team and build competition to help this team win." That folks is the lasting truth, today and every day, with the new Dolphins regime. |