Dave Hyde: Question of Dolphins’ season is if team failure breeds team success (because these guys know failure)
They’re a team of failures. Losers. Also-rans and never-weres. That was certain about these Miami Dolphins before they failed nationally and embarrassingly Monday night against Tennessee.
Look at them. Their coach was fired out of the league. Their quarterback was nearly replaced twice by the same Dolphins people who drafted him. Their right tackle was demoted to a lesser role with contingency plans made if that failed, and their running back didn’t just go undrafted. He was cut by so many teams he looks at the list on his phone before every game.
“You want to hear them?” running back Raheem Mostert said earlier this year.
He didn’t need to read the list off the phone. He lived it.
“Philadelphia. Dolphins. Baltimore. Cleveland. Cleveland again. Jets. Chicago. San Francisco,’’ he said.
Now he leads the NFL with 16 rushing touchdowns and sits second with 927 yards.
Sometimes, of course, failing only leads to more failing. Maybe the Dolphins’ final-minutes collapse to Tennessee is that story. But sometimes failing is a valuable tool to learn how to overcome something bigger.
Go to any great season. The Miami Heat’s trip to the NBA Finals last season came after the kind of last-second loss to Boston in Game 6 that steals most team’s souls. Florida Panthers coach Paul Maurice’s volatile reaction to a lackluster game in Toronto last winter helped push the team all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. For University of Miami basketball coach Jim Larranaga, a 32-point loss to Alabama became the turning point two seasons ago to a Final Eight season.
It was the great coach Abraham Lincoln, loser of eight elections, who defined success as going from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Does that fit with current Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel thinking as he left Houston’s Reliant Stadium upon being fired in 2008: “I’m going to make this the best thing to happen to me?”
Does it explain how Austin Jackson, demoted from left tackle to guard to right tackle, rose to receive a $36 million contract last week? Or how quarterback Tua Tagovailoa went from the Dolphins attempting to replace him with Deshaun Watson or Tom Brady to having a prime role on a high-scoring offense?
None of this means the Dolphins will turn Monday’s ugly loss into wins, like water into wine, starting Sunday against the New York Jets. It just explains they’ve known this challenged crossroad. Eleven Dolphins players have Mostert’s story of not having any team believe enough to draft them. Think of that. About a quarter of the Dolphins’ roster was considered undeserving of a serious investment.
That includes Kendall Lamm, who has played admirably at left tackle this year, and defensive tackle Zach Sieler, who had a pick-6 Monday night a few weeks after signing a $30.7 million contract.
Cornerback Kader Kohou wasn’t just undrafted. He wasn’t recruited out of high school and took out student loans to play Division II football. He’s played 90 percent of the snaps this year, more than any defensive teammate.
Even in a 9-4 season, some teams flinch after a loss like Monday. Some just are exposed as not good enough. But the road back to winning always starts with clinically diagnosing what went wrong and correcting it. It was the whole game for the offense. It was the last five minutes for the defense.
“I think that it’s as clear as day to me on what needs to be done with regard to handling a disappointment like that,’’ McDaniel said. “The biggest thing is you have to work through all that stuff, get better from it, than focus on the Jets.
“It is that simple and easy, but very hard to do in practice and that’s kind of the direction I’m going.”
Overcoming failure is nothing new in sports. The best coach in football is either San Francisco’s Kyle Shanahan, who is best known for losing not one but two Super Bowl leads, or Kansas City’s Andy Reid, who had so many playoff failures in Philadelphia he was fired in in 2012.
The Dolphins took a gut punch Monday night. We’ll see starting Sunday against the Jets how they handle it as a team. Individually, they’ve been here before. Mostert, as always, will go down the list of teams that cut him before the game in a unique manner. He once was cut by each team and now, years later, is having his best season.
