The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

Carpenter, I guess?  The effort all-around was pretty good.

Yeah -- 2 missed kicks made the game closer than it really was.

Henning

I hesitate to give it to anyone, but he did miss 2 FG, so I guess Carpenter.

Carpenters misses weren't exactly chip shots. 49 and 51 yards.

Benny Sapp for not being able to cover that Jacoby Ford dude all day and getting abused on the opening kickoff coverage.

Reasoning?

^^^ Stalling our offense at every opportunity. I think he would rather prove he can run the wildcat than win a game.

Carpenter is the Dolphins entire fucking offense this season the Dolphins have scored more FG than TD, he should be the team MVP. 

Pretty much this. ^^^ How many good chunks of ground were made when Henne would throw the ball, to only be screwed because two Wildcats were called and Henne had 3rd and long? Read the Live Blog and you'll see a lot of folks complaining that Henning seems to want to just screw the offense as much as possible.

Sapp

NO NO NO.  Disagreed.  The Dolphins need to run the damned ball.  If running "stalls" a team that scores 33 points, what does doing nothing but pass do to a team that gets shut out by the Bears?  The offense must remained balanced.  For this to happen, they need to run the ball like they did yesterday.

Agreed with everything JVides said.  Unless you are being blown out, you need to stick with the run (even when it is unsuccessful) to do two things:

1) keep the other team defending honestly
2) wear down their line so you can have success in the 4th

I can't agree with this idea of only running the ball if we are doing good at it.  It doesn't take a professional offensive coordinator to know that if they can't stop the run, keep running.  It's when they are stopping the run that you need to show perseverance and stick with it (provided the game is not out-of-hand).

Wow. I agree that a team needs to be able to have a good run game, like the Dolphins did at the start of the year, but calling the WILDCAT all the time stalls every drive we have. I want them to be able to pound the ball, but NOT with the wildcat. I thought I made that clear.

NO ONE is saying that we shouldn't run the ball. Even run the ball OFTEN. The problem is in very specific game situations... Like once we get inside the red zone, situations like the 2nd and 18 at the edge of field goal range... stuff like that. Situations where Henning clearly gets EXTREMELY conservative and appears perfectly content with a field goal... and with our anemic rushing this year (and predictability of his play calling in these situations -- NO ONE was fooled by the run on 2nd and 18, which gained all of 2 yards), that's a recipe for leaving a lot of points on the board. Yesterday, it kept the game close for way too long.

^ I disagree.  The one time we weren't conservative in the red zone, Henne threw a pick.

Henning called a great game.

Dave, you may not agree, but let me expound on what I see as a problem with Henning's play calling:

To look at what we did when getting within field goal range, I looked at all drives with a 1st down within the Raiders 40. That's a first down looking at a 58-yard field goal, so you need a little to get within range, but not a lot. Feel free to disagree with my "line", I had to draw it somewhere and the 40 was easy.

We had 8 drives with a 1st down within the 40 + a  two-minute drill at the end of the first half (which featured all passes inside the 40, with the exception of a single WildCat run for -1 yard).

Looking at plays within the Raiders 40 in those 8 drives:
--> there were 20 runs, 10 passes and a sack.
--> averaged 2.3 yards / attempt on the 20 running plays, of which the longest was the 8 yard keeper by Thigpen on 3rd and 12.
--> there were 12 first downs on which we ran 11 times and passed once (29 yard TD pass).

That's pretty much what it felt like when watching the game. We weren't running well with the ball in field goal range, yet we kept trying -- settling for field goals all too often.

Running on 92% of all 1st downs inside the 40 is PREDICTABLE. Although I haven't looked at the numbers from previous games, it has certainly felt like that every week.

Basically, our OFFENSE -- rushing and passing -- was doing GREAT until getting into field goal range (sound familiar?) when play calling became extremely predictable and the (otherwise great) running game completely ineffective.

You can look at the score and say, well, we scored 33 points with Hennings game plan, so it must've been good. And Henne did throw that interception in the red zone, so...

I'm just saying that there's a reason I, and others apparently, feel the way we do about the play calling. I honestly do feel it's costing us points every game and has cost us several games this season.

The predictability of our offense is what frustrates me mostly. It's pretty much run, run, pass and then crucify Henne when he fails against the worst of odds. The closer we get to scoring the more conservative it becomes. We put our odds to getting as FG more likely and usally end up doing so. Henning and Sparano seem perfectly willing to accept this when if they played it a little more open we just might get 7 instead of 3 and those add up much faster ... even with an INT once in a while. 

For the record this is one of the things that doomed Marino's carreer. Jimmy would only let him throw on third down.