Miami Dolphins’ 70-point potential a frightening prospect for lowly Giants offense

The number hangs in the air ominously for any team that faces the Miami Dolphins this season:

70.

Only two weeks ago, Mike McDaniel’s Fins boat-raced the Denver Broncos, 70-20, at the same Hard Rock Stadium the Giants are tip-toeing into this Sunday.

The Dolphins gained 726 yards of offense on Sean Payton’s Broncos and graciously decided not to try a late field goal that would have tied Chicago’s 73-point record set in the 1940 NFL Championship Game.

They became only the fourth team in league history to score 70 points in a game, and the first in 57 years. It hadn’t happened since Otto Graham’s Washington team crushed Allie Sherman’s Giants, 72-41, in 1966.

So no, Giants defensive coordinator Wink Martindale did not sleep well this week.

“My wife called me last night before she went to bed and said she was worried about me,” Martindale said Thursday. “She said, ‘Are you getting any sleep?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m sleeping like a baby; every two hours, I wake up and cry and go to the bathroom, then I try to go back and get some more sleep.’ I mean, It’s unbelievable.

“I told our staff, because we’re all old enough to remember ‘The Greatest Show on Turf’ [Los Angeles Rams]. This is like that, 2023 supersonic,” Martindale added. “I mean, they are fast. Faster than that. That’s not even turf there. It’s grass, and they’re still faster.”

This is the worst opponent the Giants (1-3) could have drawn at this juncture of a disastrous season that is speeding off the rails. The Giants’ defensive players are frustrated, even if they’re being diplomatic and saying the right things.

They are confident in themselves, continuing to believe they can become the “dominant defense we know we can be,” linebacker Bobby Okereke said. And they’re trying to focus on their task only and nothing else in the big picture.

“It’s day by day, week by week,” safety Jason Pinnock said of the defense’s focus. “You start to look too far ahead, and then games creep up on you and it’s a slippery slope. So you have to stay focused.”

But nothing will creep up on the Giants’ defense this week. The Dolphins (3-1) intend to race towards them and blaze right by them.

“It’s like if you were driving on Daytona NASCAR and then jumped in and tried to race against a Formula 1 guy,” Martindale said of their speed.

Edge rusher Azeez Ojulari, who played at Georgia, remembers Jaylen Waddle’s lightning speed and yards after the catch at Alabama.

“The ‘YAC’ is crazy,” Ojulari said Friday.

Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa is completing 71.3% of his passes. Waddle is averaging 17.5 yards per catch. Unicorn receiver Tyreek Hill is gaining 16.8 yards per clip.

Rookie running back De’Von Achane (third round, Texas A&M) is averaging 11.4 yards per carry. “He runs 4.3 with his pads on,” Martindale said. Veteran back Raheem Mostert is racking up 5.2 yards per rush.

The Dolphins have only run 38 third-down plays in four weeks, despite being the NFL’s highest-scoring team (37.5 points per game), because they constantly generate explosive plays.

Getting them to third down is rare, let alone forcing them off the field. Only the red-hot Bills have had success, holding the Dolphins to 3-for-10 on third downs in last week’s 48-20 Buffalo home win.

“Mike McDaniel is a stud,” Martindale said of the former 49ers assistant. “It goes back to he’s from the [Kyle] Shanahan tree. It used to be Kyle, and everybody would say he’s got Mike McDaniel with him. Now, it’s Mike McDaniel. He’s from that tree, but Mike’s his own guy.”

Ojulari said no one is going to completely stop the Dolphins. But the Giants do need to be aggressive and remain resilient to try and slow them down.

“You know they’ll hit plays,” he said. “You just have to have a next-play mentality, tackle and be physical at the point of attack. We’ve gotta bring it to ‘em.”

As Martindale put it: “You’ve got to just have that mentality that’s like, ‘Here we go again.’”

The biggest danger for the Giants, though, isn’t that they won’t stop the Dolphins. It’s that this will be another ‘here we go again’ game for Brian Daboll’s offense.

The Dolphins score in bunches. The Giants don’t score at all.

Miami’s Mostert has scored six touchdowns this season. The Giants have scored five TDs as a team.

The Dolphins scored 70 points against the Broncos. The Giants have scored 46 this season.

Tight end Darren Waller summarized the state of the Giants perfectly this week:

“The defense has played more than well enough for us to win football games, and we trust them to go out there and do that,” Waller said. “We’ve just got to do what we’ve got to do [as an offense].

Waller could not sugarcoat his disappointment after last week’s 24-3 loss to the Seahawks in which the defense played well and the offense floundered.

“The offense is just not good enough in all facets,” Waller said after that loss. “I don’t even have anything to really say. It’s just not good enough … I don’t ever take the field expecting to put a performance like that on display on any team that I have ever been on.”

A better offense won’t just put points on the board. It could help Kayvon Thibodeaux and Ojulari build on Thibodeaux’s two sacks against Seattle when an opponent has to throw the ball to catch or keep up.

“Everything gets exaggerated in the situations that we’ve been in, you know what I mean?” Martindale said. “If you want to talk about sacks and everything else, it’s hard to get sacks when you don’t have the lead. That’s just a fact. I mean, that’s not saying anything. It’s a team game. We’ve got to play better. That’s all I’m concerned about defensively is we’ve got to play better to help out if somebody else is not playing better.

“We didn’t play well in Arizona in the first half,” he added. “The offense picked us up, and then we took off. So it’s a team game with all three phases. They have to play together for you to even have a chance in this league.”

Exactly: Sunday is going to take everyone just to be competitive.

If the offense can match the defense’s energy and production, the Giants will have a chance to stay in the game. But if the defense is left on an island against this Dolphins attack, Miami is capable of embarrassing the Giants.

And there is no telling where this season would go from there.