Sunday brings the end of another dumpy Miami Dolphins season, but not to the problems needing solutions or the organizational mess that demands more than a offseason cleanup on Aisle 5.
There’s cleanup needed on aisles five, six, seven and eight in a manner they might not have the time or stomach to do.
The good news is team owner Steve Ross and his son-in-law, Daniel Sillman — yes, his inclusion in decisions is part of some needed change — realize the team’s personnel department needs a complete rebuild. General manager. Scouts. Middle-management. Top to bottom. Everything.
Now, you can be snarky and say a smarter organization would have realized this before the tank-for-tomorrow rebuild was entrusted to former general manager Chris Grier in 2019. Or realized it in 2020. Or 2021. Or …
When Ross fired Grier and his two top lieutenants in November, he decided to redo the front office in a manner he hadn’t since buying the team 17 years and no playoff wins ago.
Hey, what’s the rehab line that all awareness starts with self-awareness?
Maybe they get it after years of trying to trick the system (tanking, free-agent-paloozas): Whoever evaluates talent is the most important person in any franchise in every sport. It can be the GM or coach or someone behind the scenes.
But Step One of this busy offseason was moving on from the previous, clumsy personnel department.
Step Two was hiring ESPN analyst and Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman to help with the general manager search. He’s a team outsider. That’s needed. With his broadcasting job he’s allowed inside virtually every team. That’s needed. He’s not hiring the next GM — he’s identifying potential candidates for interviews.
You can see the value in that even if it’s an unconventional move to raid the broadcast booth. But it’s also unconventional to have almost the same inner circle, minus Grier, making decisions: Ross, team president Tom Garfinkel, vice president Brandon Shore and, what, is Dan Marino in or out? (What a screw-up that was on several levels leaving him in the dark for weeks about Aikman.)
Maybe that stale circle is why Sillman came aboard or Shore started to have a larger voice last offseason. Ross has receipts, too. He should know who to trust, or not, by seeing who was right or wrong on major decisions in past years like staying with Grier forever, passing on quarterbacks Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen and Justin Herbert, drafting Tua Tagovailoa and hiring Brian Flores and Mike McDaniel.
Which gets to McDaniel. Can we get the mop here on Aisle Seven? Or is one not coming?
The inside chatter and tea leaves say Ross wants to bring McDaniel back next season. Nothing’s final until Ross makes it so. But surely Ross knows he’s shrinking the pool of GM candidates by bringing back a quirky coach with a mediocre record who was run over by star players last season and started 1-6 to effectively end this season.
Aikman already was hired by the team in his niche role of counseling the GM search when he let the nation know all through the fourth quarter against Pittsburgh what he thought of McDaniel. “Flabbergasted” was the word for coaching and time-management decisions.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
The case for McDaniel shouldn’t be he ran off four consecutive wins with the season kaput, players performed hard for him or any too-soon presumptions on rookie quarterback Quinn Ewers. Those are low bars for a lost organization.
The only case for McDaniel is he’s spent four years learning on the job and knows how to be a head coach now. Maybe Ross believes that. Maybe he’s right.
This won’t be an easy offseason. There’s no John Harbaugh or Mike Vrabel waiting to check all the necessary boxes of a troubled organization like in the past two offseasons.
But Ross has done one thing right. He’s rebuilding the personnel department. It takes talent to find talent. Maybe with Aikman’s help they find the guy who can find the quarterback to put this franchise in better shape.
That’s where everything starts. It cost seven years dating to 2019, so far, in getting the Tua-or-Herbert decision wrong. This offseason can start the long climb back.
