The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

I saw an interesting stat from Dan LeBatard.

Prior to this season, McDaniel's Dolphins were 19-5 in games where they scored at least three touchdowns.  This season, they are 1-4 in such games.
This means that effectively, the offense has to come out and score at least 4 touchdowns to have a shot at winning.

It is really underestimated how incredibly bad the 2025 Dolphins defense is.  And we expected the CBs to be terrible, but that's not even the main problem!  MIA has the 20th-ranked pass defense in YPG; certainly not good, but better than (for example) TB, IND, NE, PIT, and JAX.  In contrast, this team has the worst run defense in the league by far, and if not for the also-terrible run defense of the Bills, the gap would be even more stark: the gap between #1 worst MIA and 3rd-worst DAL is greater than the gap between DAL and 13th-worst KC.

This was always on the cards from the moment the core of our defense was brutally gutted at the end of 2023 because of salary cap mismanagement (thanks Grier).

You just can't lose that many defensive starters from the rebuild in that short time and not expect massive consequences.

Which starters are you referring to?

X was washed up.  Wilkins left, but Campbell was an excellent replacement last year at far less than what LV paid for Wilkins (and that's setting aside what LV actually received from him).  AVG wasn't a starter until Phillips went down, and wouldn't have started on a team where Phillips and Chubb are healthy; he certainly wasn't a "core" player in Miami.

That leaves Raekwon Davis, Jerome Baker, and DeShon Elliott as starting defenders who left the Dolphins after 2023.  I don't think money was a factor in letting any of those three go.

edit: To be clear, I agree this is on Grier.  I just think it's for different reasons:

1) It was a mistake to pay Sieler.  I said before the extension that MIA couldn't keep paying players ahead of schedule, and it looks like they've been snakebit again.  It's one thing to pay a QB ahead of schedule, because losing a franchise QB is a catastrophe.  Sieler... is not a franchise player.  He's solid, but he ain't Chris Jones, Aaron Donald, or a similar player that takes over the game.

2) Jaelan Phillips is a bust.  After 5 years, he's never been more than a complementary pass rusher... and that's in the limited time he's been healthy.

3) The trades for Chubb and Ramsey were "win now" and the Dolphins didn't win now.  Ramsey is already gone and Chubb is on the downswing.

There's a parallel universe where Matt Milano doesn't give Tua a concussion on a dirty hit, where Chubb doesn't blow out his ACL, where Phillips and Armstead and AJ and Connor Williams all stay healthy.  This team's window was slammed shut by multiple medical carts.

Explaining the Dolphins' Drastic Downfall

The Miami Dolphins were 5-1 heading into Week 7 two years ago and now stand 1-5, so what happened to make things go south?

https://www.si.com/nfl/dolphins/onsi/news/explaining-the-dolphins-drastic-downfall-01k7he51ysyn

I think that goes into a decent bit of detail about the turnover in players from 2023 (although that somehow misses Brandon Jones, who lets face it would have been more than handy the last two seasons).

The bottom line is money was a huge factor in letting all of them go (apart from one with a first name starting with X). From Wilkins to Davis, Baker, AVG, Holland, Jones... pretty much everybody. On the offensive side of the ball, you can lump Hunt and Williams in there too.

I think you vastly underestimate the level some of those guys were playing at in 2023 (especially X and AVG), but putting that aside, there was something else that's been banged on about this season: leadership. That was there in a core of players who had started at the basement as draftees and worked their way up to that point - together.

When the defense was gutted, the trust and quality of that leadership was also ripped apart - Campbell was briefly a bandaid, but pretenders like Ramsey and Poyer (and Hill on the Offense) negated that. In the last few weeks Tua has become too much of a flake (or taken too many hits to the head, or both) to be trusted by anyone, including his teammates.

Well, Brandon Jones wasn't a starter when the 2023 defense was healthy, and Holland was still on the team for 2024; neither were "cap casualties" in 2023.

MIA was never going to be in a position to offer Rob Hunt $20M/yr, and I continue to assert that Wilkins was not worth what LV gave him (even if he stays healthy).  Connor Williams 1) played less than one season after 2023 and 2) has been capably replaced by Brewer, so that seems like a very poor example.

Again, if you want to make the argument that letting Raekwon Davis, Jerome Baker, and DeShon Elliott go is the reason why the defense sucks today, then fine. But Davis is already out of the league and Baker has only started 10 games since the beginning of 2024; he currently can't get off the bench on the 1-5 Browns.

The cap casualties of 2024 (Jones, Holland, AVG, Hunt, etc) were for the exact same reasons as the cap casualties of 2023: Grier opted to pay an insane amount of money to Tyreek, Chubb, Ramsey, and then Tua (and Waddle, which will really kick in soon enough) leaving bugger-all for anyone else.

Half of the starting defense last season was made up of washed up veterans and players off the street on discount one year contracts, and this season it's even worse.

You're welcome to have your own opinions on these guys and voice them, but the common denominator is the bulk of the players we drafted in the first three rounds of our rebuild (mainly on defense) have walked, and the majority of them was because Grier overspent and couldn't pay them, while other teams had the cap space and were all to happy to grab them. That's the biggest difference between the Dolphins defense of 2023, and the defense of 2025 (along with Fangio as DC). Leadership can be lumped into that as part of the difference.

You can argue that's because of Grier blowing those draft picks, or making a huge mess of his salary cap management - and both would be true, it's just a question of how much? I'd say it's more the latter - as Fangio said, that 2023 defense was in the top 5 of all categories for the majority of the season before it was crippled by injuries at the very end. Those players couldn't be that bad.

In contrast, as you mentioned in your article, this 2025 defense is in the bottom half of most categories (and close to rock bottom in too many). The talent level isn't remotely close. Neither is the amount of money allocated to it (even with Sieler's pay-rise - which he is doing his best to make a mockery of - that was countered by Chubb's pay cut to stay on the team, and Ramsey's post June 1st trade).

You gotta admit Spider that the willingness to spend on defensive players has not been the same as it has been on offensive players since McDaniel has been here. I think you can blame that on McDaniel as much as you can blame that on Grier. I'm sure that all Grier's decisions are made with full knowledge and input from McDaniel.

But McDaniel isn't the defensive coordinator either. Perhaps it's time to get rid of Weaver?

I really appreciate this take, Spider.

I have been frustrated with the state of Dolphins online discourse lately and I miss old-style TDMMC forums as opposed to large scale social media threads.

Fire Grier banners and memes just don't cut it.  Sure, put the blame on a guy and let him go if you want, but it's so much more helpful and cathartic to break down where things went wrong and what to try to do about it.

Also, I still would like to try to get us to salvage whatever season we have left.  We are mere plays from being in a much better position and I'd like to see a team playing like that before the end of the year.

Our defense is noticeably bad.  And though Tua hasn't played perfect or even great football sometimes, it's hard to watch a game where he does what he needs to, throws a game-winning TD with 40 seconds left on a perfect drive and then to have the defense immediately give it away -- when the narrative after that is stats about how Tua can't beat a good team, I want to log-off.

Whether it's true or not, our takes have to be a little deeper.

I disagree.  Chubb, Ramsey (later Minkah), and Sieler have been significant investments on the defensive side of the ball.

The Dolphins are currently 30th in the league in EPA per rush surrendered, and 31st in the league in EPA per pass dropback surrendered.

Their pass defense is horrendous, and in fact worse than their run defense.

The two strongest predictors of winning in the NFL are pass offense and pass defense, in that order.  Run defense isn't a significant predictor of winning in the NFL when the other major facets of the game (pass offense, rush offense, pass defense) are considered.

A team can be poor in run defense and still have a good overall regular season record (over 17 games).  If a team has a pass defense as poor as the Dolphins' it's almost impossible for it to have a good overall season record.

Such is the difference in importance between pass defense and run defense in terms of winning in the present-day NFL.

I agree the Defense is more to blame for the Dolphins losses vs. the offense.  With the injuries and player losses I expected the defensive backfield to be bad, but I didn't expect the defensive line to be so bad, and they are bordering on terrible.

Another area that doesn't get talked about is special teams.  Special teams has really given up some big plays, and that's another example of poor coaching and sloppy play.

I don't think it is poor coaching but poor team building.  Grier consistently puts together that can be competitive if absolutely nobody gets injured, overpaying the top 20 stars and completely ignoring the rest of the roster.  Championships are not won by having the best starters but by having backups that can step in. 

You got me there but in most of those cases they are spending money on players not with the Dolphins to bring them to the Dolphins. That's not the same thing as what they are doing on the Offensive side of the ball. In my humble opinion they don't spend enough on players they have developed and spend way too much to bring players from other teams to the Dolphins.

I completely agree with you there Dave, but you also can't look at Tua in a vacuum either. The Dolphins didn't lose the Chargers game in the last 40 seconds, they lost the game in the 3rd quarter when they did absolutely NOTHING with the ball for the entire 3rd quarter and put the defense in bad position to boot and let the Chargers pull away. If they don't do that perhaps the Dolphins are up by 7 instead of 1 in the last 40 seconds and pull out a win. Tua's not to blame, but he's also not off the hook for the loss either. He was bad for parts of the game and then pulled it together in the 4th quarter. If he does that throughout the whole game, maybe he doesn't need to pull off a 4th quarter come from behind victory. No, I don't expect Tua to be great all the time, but you can't just look at his final numbers or the fact that he put together 2 great drives in the 4th quarter, you have to look at the game as a whole. He's been both good and bad at times throughout his career. He's exciting to watch when he's good which is when he's decisive and making good decisions, but when he's not, it's pretty ugly. He doesn't have the ability to go off script which is what you expect from a franchise type QB.

I don't want anyone to think I'm blaming Tua or his contract for the Dolphins poor start to 2025, I'm not. I'm just saying that there's a middle ground on Tua that most of his fans don't seem to want to recognize and immediately brush off as "hater" anyone who mentions it. It's a team sport and QB is a part of the team. I don't believe in assigning wins and losses to QB's those go to the team and everyone on the team including coaches, GM's and owners. They all get partial credit for either.

With regard to the Dolphins/Chargers game, one of those teams came out of the locker room after the half driven and determined, and the other came out flat.  You have to wonder if that's another symptom of the culture problem evident with this team.  Going into the locker room at the half and regrouping can galvanize a team, but if you're a team with poor leadership and a poor culture, it's unlikely to have that effect and can instead have the opposite one.

I think having backups that can step in comes from having good coaching.  Starters usually have the most natural talent, competent backups come from working hard and getting good coaching.

While coaching matters, scouting and player selection matters even more with the bottom half of the roster.  Rather than identifying complete players you are assessing flawed players and need to identify which players my have unrealized potential and which ones have limited room for growth.

Looking ahead at the upcoming 10 opponents there are only two that I feel Miami has a chance at beating, the Saints and Jets.  With all the others Miami is an underdog, some a big underdog, that means we're looking at a 3-14 record.  At best there is a coaching and/or QB change that could eek out another two wins if opponents look past the Dolphins.  I'm not looking forward to Achane or Waddle being traded, hopefully that won't happen.  I'd be fine with Chubb being traded, even Sieler at this point since he seems to have fallen off a cliff.  Minkah can go also, I doubt he really wants to be with Miami anyways.  I wish they could trade Tua but they won't get anything but a late round draft pick AND they probably would have to pay part of his salary going forward.  The only way Tua gets traded is if a playoff team loses their QB to an injury.