Miami's receivers

[ethurst22a]

having a suspect passing attack is not going to win you championships in today's nfl. scoring comes through the passing game, and high scoring teams use the pass to set up the run.

the running game is not dead, it is just secondary to today's high scoring passing attacks. the quicker the dolphins realize this, the better they will position themselves to be a consistent contender.

Goodell and the guys at NFL Headquarters will never admit that the NFL is really the CFL South. You look at the passing rules of both leagues, they are almost the same.

[Phishfan]

^^^ Shouldn't they be almost the same. Afterall it is the same game.

[ethurst22a]

^^^ Shouldn't they be almost the same. Afterall it is the same game.

NFL would never admit to taking any philosophy from the CFL. CFL always promoted wide open passing attacks (see Warren Moon and Doug Flutie's stats). We know its the same but the NFL will never admit it. Besides, they've (NFL) have been around for almost 100 years.

I see that Miami is trying out more CFL players for its roster.

[JVides]

^^^Now, I've watched the CFL (I lived in Canada) and I think the rules are quite different, including how the CFL allows several players to be in motion at the snap, up to and including running at the line of scrimmage (like in the arena league, right?).  In the NFL, only one player may be in motion, and he must be moving parallel to the line of scrimmage.

[Dolphin-UK]

I think the "we need WR's" argument is to some extent defunct. Generally speaking any team which doesn't need one particular area is in the playoffs. The mere fact that we can point to WR as the area of weakness is excellent and here's why.

Starting this year we knew we were weak at WR.
Previous year we were searching for the answer to the QB problem before Pennington fell into our laps
Before that we needed an OL that could block before we could see whether we had the answer at QB
We started with a decent running game but an OL which wasn't great and no passing threat

So I think my point is, it's a progression for us and now after 3 years of work we're at the point where we can say that yes, we can start to look for a game breaking WR, AS LONG AS the front office is able to maintain the other squad areas after years of mismanagement and poor player selection

[BigDaddyFin]

^^^^agreed somewhat with Dolphin UK.

What we had in the 80's that made the offense so good is that Duper and Clayton were really fast and had different knacks for getting open.  Duper beat guys deep primarily, and Clayton was almost as fast with better hands, therefore he could stretch the field wide.

With the extra WR's common to today's offense you need at least 1 reciever who can still beat you deep and then the Slot reciever needs to be able to catch the ball and go over the middle.  The remaining guys need to at least be possession recievers with above average speed. 

On paper we have this.  Ginn has deep speed, Hartline is going to be somewhere between a deep threat and a possession reciever, Bess easily goes over the middle and then you have Camarillo who is an excellent possession reciever. 

The problem is that Ginn doesn't catch the ball like he should and thus Henne checks down a lot, Hartline ends up running shorter routes and more pressure is on Bess and Camarillo to pick up big chunks of yardage they probably wouldn't need to otherwise. 

Get one more reciever with deep speed who can catch the ball, and you've got at least 4 recievers who fit the modern day offense.  Then it doesn't really matter if Ginn turns out to be a bust or much more than a kick returner.

[Doc-phin]

Get one more receiver with deep speed who can catch the ball, and you've got at least 4 receivers who fit the modern day offense.  Then it doesn't really matter if Ginn turns out to be a bust or much more than a kick returner.

Don't mistake this for disagreeing with anything in your post, but I never understood why Bess was never used as a deep threat.  I think his speed is under-rated, mostly because he never gets a chance to get going on punt returns and therefore looks slow.  We all think of him as a shifty slot type guy, but I think there is potential there for more deep balls.

This all comes back to offensive schemes and philosophy.  I think our coaches were scared to promote the deep ball in the interest of protecting from turnovers.  Although I still believe we need a more "dangerous" receiver, I think a lot of our problem has been our coaches offensive mindset.  What the coaches were trying to do only works when your defense is dominant.

[Sunstroke]

Don't mistake this for disagreeing with anything in your post, but I never understood why Bess was never used as a deep threat.  I think his speed is under-rated, mostly because he never gets a chance to get going on punt returns and therefore looks slow.  We all think of him as a shifty slot type guy, but I think there is potential there for more deep balls.

I disagree with this a little bit, as I think where Bess shows his speed best is in and out of his cuts, and that he lacks true top-end, deep threat, "blow past ya on the post" speed. I would love nothing more than to see Bess' development focused in on the slot WR role, because I believe that is where he could contribute the most to Miami's offense.

This all comes back to offensive schemes and philosophy.  I think our coaches were scared to promote the deep ball in the interest of protecting from turnovers.  Although I still believe we need a more "dangerous" receiver, I think a lot of our problem has been our coaches offensive mindset.  What the coaches were trying to do only works when your defense is dominant.

I agree with this completely...though I think it's natural to expect a new coaching staff to err toward the conservative side of things, especially given the skill sets of most of their primary offensive producers. I hope that, as we add more talent to the offense, it translates out to more aggressive play-calling to make use of that talent.  We definitely need a true #1 WR though...