Miami Dolphins: fire Tony Sparano now to give 2012 hope, fill seats

by Bill Palmer

Firing head coach Tony Sparano just a few games into the 2011 Miami Dolphins season won’t save it, but it’ll reassure fans this this failed season is the last in which they’ll have to pay the price for former team owner Wayne Huizenga’s Bill Parcells mistake. This season lost any hope of being a success when new owner Stephen Ross tried to fire Sparano after back to back losing seasons, but relented and allowed him to keep the job another year after failing to find a suitable replacement. Whatever power Sparano had prior to that, and whatever odds the Dolphins had of fielding a winning team this year, went out the window in that moment. Predictably, the team is suffering from what players admit are bad practices, and Sparano himself unwittingly admitted that he doesn’t have the team’s full attention heading into home games. Having lost its first two games, Miami is far from mathematically eliminated. But in practical sense the season is lost. The only way in which fans can now frame 2011 as being a “success” in any way is if they can be assured that it’ll end in regime change. And dumping Sparano now goes a long way to giving fans hope in that regard…

Not that the current Dolphins mess is all Sparano’s fault. Sure, the former position coach with no head coaching or even coordinator experience is in over his head by any objective measure. And if he hasn’t figured it out by year four, he never will. But other than being incompetent, you can’t blame Sparano for the organization being in a nosedive overall. That dates back to when Huizenga brought in Parcells to run the organization, and Parcells responded by giving jobs to his buddies like Sparano, Jeff Ireland, Dan Henning, and Paul Pasqualoni jobs for which they were in hindsight clearly not suited for. The latter two have been fired already, Sparano has one foot out the door, and Ireland’s personnel moves have reached a level of comic ineptitude. Cutting veterans Will Allen and Channing Crowder has made the defense significantly worse, as Ireland had to admit when he subsequently brought Allen back a week later; Crowder, who made negative comments about Ireland after being dismissed, won’t be brought back. Ireland’s biggest move of the offseason was bringing in Reggie Bush for the sake of using him as the offense’s primary workhorse running back, something neither Bush’s skill set nor his fragility in the injury department make him particularly suited for. And then there’s the quarterback mess in which Ireland tried and failed to trade for Kyle Orton, only to see incumbent starter Chad Henne mildly outperform Orton’s efforts in Denver. And that’s before one considers the Dolphins’ disastrous offensive line, which Ireland has had four offseasons to get right. Ireland must go at the end of the year just as sure as Sparano must go…

But Sparano must go now. It won’t fix anything on the field. Defensive coordinator Mike Nolan, who would take over as interim head coach for the remainder of the season, won’t be able to do much more with Ireland’s botched 2011 roster. But it’ll be a sign to fans that, if nothing else, Sparano won’t be around to mis-coach the 2012 season. And after years of diminishing returns which make clear that the entire Parcells Dolphins era was a waste bordering on scam artistry, it’ll move the franchise one step closer to putting that painful era in the rear view. After Dolphins owner Stephen Ross all but literally forfeited the 2011 season by pre-firing Sparano but allowing him to keep the job anyway, giving fans assurance that Sparano won’t be around to ruin 2012 is the least Ross can do in terms of beginning the road to atonement. Hope for 2012 might even convince fans, who are avoiding Dolphins home games in record numbers, to change their mind and start showing up in 2011 out of pure hope for next year amid this already-forfeited season.

Miami Dolphins Larry Johnson insulting to Ronnie Brown, Ricky Williams

by Bill Palmer

The Miami Dolphins have signed veteran running back Larry Johnson, leaving South Florida fans wondering what’s going on and former Dolphin running backs Ronnie Brown (now with the Philadelphia Eagles) and Ricky Williams (just signed with the Baltimore Ravens) feeling lucky they were shown the door when they were. After an offseason in which Dolphins head coach Tony Sparano was essentially pre-fired after a failed attempt to replace him on the part of owner Stephen Ross followed by a win-this-year-or-you’re-out ultimatum, Dolphins nation had to have been expecting a turbulent 2011 season. But before it’s even begun, Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland is already making panic moves which suggest that he believes his job is on the line this season as well. But instead of investing free agent money in the name of improving one of the areas in which the team has struggled (offensive line, quarterback, free safety), Ireland instead decided that a revamp of the running back position was in order. Millions of dollars and multiple draft picks later, the team is no better at the position than when the offseason began, and arguably worse.

Before Dolphins fans jump too far down my throat, full disclosure: I’m one of you. Lifelong fan, and I attend multiple home games each year despite now living thousands of miles away from Miami. In other words, I feel your pain. But after watching this Parcells-led regime go up in smoke (so much so that Parcells is no longer even part of it) for the past few seasons, it now seems clear that Ireland and Sparano are making moves aimed not at improving the franchise or winning games so much as prolonging their own employment for one more year. Understandable, as no one wants to get fired. But these guys are not only botching the present, they’re now screwing up the future…

Ronnie Brown and Ricky Williams were arguably two of the four most talented players the Dolphins had on offense (Jake Long and Brandon Marshall each would have something to say about that). But both were free agents and neither was signed to a contract extension despite the fact that neither would have been expensive. Their combined dropoff in production in 2010 seemed to be clearly a result of the fact that the offensive line, whose personnel have been revamped and replaced so many times during this regime that I’ve lost count, couldn’t block their own shadow. While Ireland did use the team’s first round pick on center Mike Pouncey, he then made a move which was nothing short of head-scratching: instead of continuing to revamp the o-line with his second pick, he instead chose running back Daniel Thomas despite the team not needing help at that position. Then, the minute the NFL lockout ended, he traded for New Orleans Saints running back Reggie Bush. This meant the end of the line for Ronnie and Ricky, who eventually signed elsewhere. The reshuffling was a head scratcher even before the Dolphins went and signed Larry Johnson today…

Reggie Bush is essentially Ronnie Brown with a flashier personality and the ability to return kicks: a running back who’s equal parts bruising, aging, and injury-prone. Actually Bush is more injury-prone than Brown, making the while thing a wash (particularly now that the NFL has changed the rules to de-emphasize kick returns) – except that the Dolphins traded an undisclosed draft pick in order to land Bush. That pick was arguably stolen from the next Dolphins regime, the GM and coach who will replace Ireland and Sparano once they’re presumably fired at the end of this season. Daniel Thomas, a rookie and still a question mark, plus Bush cost the team a second round and probably a fifth round draft pick. And they’re likely no better at the position in 2011 than they were in 2010.

On top of it, something must be wrong with at least one of these two guys already. Reggie Bush looked fine in his one preseason game, so that suggests that the rookie Thomas is having adjustment issues. That’s not a good sign for a high draft pick. The team apparently is worried enough about Thomas that they went out and signed Larry Johnson, an aging running back who offers that rare quality of having a career full of character and criminal concerns while not having been productive in years. Why was he signed off the scrap heap? Because he was available for cheap. Hmm, if only the team had thought to keep Ricky Williams or Ronnie Brown around, who were both available for cheap up until a couple weeks ago. Unlike Johnson, Ricky and Ronnie are still productive. But they were apparently each run out of town for different reasons.

Ronnie had to go because he was the designated scapegoat. Rather than keep the same starting running back and allow it to be seen that it was the poorly built (or poorly coached) offensive line which was the problem, Brown was replaced by a similar running back because, hey, somebody had to take the blame for the poor o-line play, and it wasn’t going to be Ireland for his personnel moves or Sparano for his coaching. And as for Ricky, he made the mistake of being honest: when asked about Sparano in an interview, he said what every Dolphins fan who watches closely already knows: Sparano is a micro-manager rather than a leader, the kind of guy who celebrates field goals by gesticulating wildly rather than pushing his team to come up with touchdowns instead. Williams had to go as well, for reasons which apparently had nothing to do with making Miami’s roster better. For Dolphins fans, or at least for this one, the deflating part is knowing that even if Ricky and Ronnie hadn’t been snatched up by significantly more talented teams (they’re good enough to play for the playoff-bound Ravens and Eagles but not the Dolphins?), Ireland and Sparano would probably still have opted for an inferior outside option like Larry Johnson instead. After all, when the regime is failing, those on the inside who know that the emperor doesn’t have any clothes are the first ones to get shoved out the door. Sadly, I fear the only way in which the Dolphins can have a “successful” 2011 season is if things blow up badly enough that it ends in regime change.

NFL has no business punishing Miami Dolphins over Jeff Ireland

Although the newly revealed “my dad was a pimp” context in which the question apparently turns out to have been asked in makes it a lot less inappropriate than if it had come out of the blue, there’s still no defending an employer asking a potential hire whether his mother was a prostitute, no matter the context – which is why there’s no way to go about defending the fact that Miami Dolphins General Manager Jeff Ireland asked that question of wide receiver Dez Bryant earlier this year. And it’s good that the issue has surfaced, because it’s about time the NFL got around to dealing with this kind of thing. It’s not that the intentions of GMs aren’t logical when these questions are asked, of course. Once a player gets on the field, players from the opposing team are going to say every insulting and offensive thing that they can, as soon as the ref is out of earshot. That will include slurs, family insults, you name it, and a team needs to know that in that situation, the player being insulted isn’t going to snap and beat the snot out of the guy delivering the insults and get his team penalized in the process. It’s one of those dirty underbelly aspects of football that most of us as fans would just as soon pretend didn’t exist, along with the money-fueled disloyalty that teams and players show each other so routinely.

Now that the issue is out in the open, the league will likely lay down “good taste” guidelines for all teams to follow when interviewing potential draft picks (and perhaps even employ league emissaries to monitor such interviews), and that’s good thing. But the NFL has been a little too trigger happy of late when it comes to punishing its employees just to try to get on the right side of the public relations equation. The league’s suspension and resulting financial punishment of Ben Roethlisberger for merely having been accused of a crime without evidence was illegal in itself, and he could have gotten his suspension overturned (at least the “unpaid” part of it) in about five minutes if he’d filed an injunction in court; the only reason he didn’t was that he likely knows the Pittsburgh Steelers would cut or trade him if he tried (which would also have been illegal on the part of the team, yet unprovable – but that’s another conversation for another day). If Jeff Ireland is fined, the Dolphins will likely tell him to swallow it as well so that the situation can be put to rest. But if the league gets uppity again and decides to punish the organization in terms of draft picks, don’t expect the Dolphins to stand for it; despite the tactlessness of Ireland’s question, he was breaking no rule and was not deviating from what was – until this week – considered the norm for these kinds of interviews. So while it’s a good thing this came out in public and will now be fixed on a permanent basis by the league, expect Bill Parcells and company to launch a holy war if the league tries to make some kind of example out of the Dolphins that goes beyond making Jeff Ireland’s wallet a little lighter. Even that kind of “message” delivered by the league would be over the top (unless they’re going to go back and fine every other GM who has asked a potential draft pick a similar question in the past month), but the team would likely swallow it. But even the NFL should know better than to come between Parcells and his cache of future draft picks.