Miami Dolphins sign JP Losman: hidden Andrew Luck motivations abound

by Bill Palmer

The Miami Dolphins have signed quarterback JP Losman, formerly of the Buffalo Bills and Las Vegas Locomotives, after placing backup QB Sage Rosenfels on injured reserve. With starter Chad Henne out for the year, backup quarterback Chad Pennington working in the broadcast booth, and replacement starter Matt Moore banged up, the Dolphins are now one snap away from having Losman under center in the midst of a winless 0-6 season which looms dangerously close to becoming an 0-16 affair as the team is coming off a last minute collapse loss to the Denver Broncos, one of the worst teams in the league, with no easier opponents remaining on the schedule. That leaves fans torn as to whether suffering the ignominy of a winless season is worth landing the number one draft pick and getting to take Andrew Luck, who scouts have said may be the best quarterback prospect coming out of college since Peyton Manning. You have to figure GM Jeff Ireland and head coach Tony Sparano are taking these final ten games seriously, both nearly assured to be fired if they don’t manage to pull off some kind of desperate and wholesale turnaround in these next ten games (making the playoffs would likely require winning all ten of them). But for fans, this is all starting to feel like a joke, particularly when NFL washouts like JP Losman who’ve done time in the UFL are about to be handed the keys to the rest of the season. So in that spirit, here are some potential slogans the Dolphins might use to introduce Losman in the inevitable press conference…

“We’ve signed JP Losman because we want to make clear that our commitment to losing is stronger than ever”

“This guy led his team to a championship season… in the UFL.”

“At least his name isn’t Chad.”

“He can’t be any worse than Cleo Lemon.”

“Losman… Heisman… we’re just saying.”

“The last time we had a season this bad, we ended up with the #1 overall draft pick and we… nevermind.”

“Hey, at least we didn’t trade any draft picks this time.”

“You wanted us to Suck for Luck. We didn’t say it wouldn’t be painful.”

Fire Tony Sparano and Miami Dolphins win games, but risk Andrew Luck

by Bill Palmer

The Miami Dolphins 2011 season is over, and firing Tony Sparano now won’t change that. Actually, the season was over before it started, as this kind of disastrous outcome was all but cemented when owner Stephen Ross made the decision to retain Sparano; flirting with Jim Harbaugh and taking away what little ability Sparano had left merely served to put the blown-season guarantee in three inch letters. But firing Sparano increases the odds that the winless Dolphins might actually win a game or two this season, dodging the infamy of joining the Detroit Lions as the only franchises to have ever gone 0-16. Dumping Sparano also gets the fanbase back on board. No, it won’t lure too many people to buy tickets to remaining games this year, but it might convince season ticket holders to actually show up for the rest of the year instead of staying home in protest. However, firing Sparano and winning a few games in the process could put the Dolphins at risk of losing out on the Andrew Luck sweepstakes, as only the team with the worst record and the first overall draft pick has a shot at the supposed once-in-a-generation quarterback. Stephen Ross has to ask himself what’s more important…

If Ross has already given up on 2011, the smartest thing might be to simply stand pat. Tony Sparano has proven himself to be so wholly incapable of being an NFL head coach that his incompetence has clearly rubbed off on the players, who make so many mental mistakes that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Blowing a fifteen point lead at home with five minutes left, to a terrible Denver Broncos team, led by an inexperienced quarterback in Tim Tebow who was having a historically awful day up to that point, takes a special kind of talent. Miami’s players have had their heads screwed up so badly by Sparano’s mismanagement that they can’t seem to function. If he’s allowed to coach the final ten games, the Dolphins should easily lose at least nine of them. That’ll likely put the 1-15 team ahead of the Indianapolis Colts (who should be able to beat its woeful division rival Jacksonville Jaguars in at least one of their two 2011 matchups) and the St Louis Rams (who should be able to count on Sam Bradford pulling out at least a couple wins for them) in the 2012 drafting order…

Firing Sparano means the Dolphins could win one, two, or maybe even three out of their final ten games. Defensive coordinator Mike Nolan, himself on the line amid an awful defensive year for the team, would at least provide a stabilizing effect if he took over as interim head coach; he wasn’t successful in his earlier head coaching stint with the San Francisco 49ers, but he wasn’t disastrous either. Brian Daboll’s offense, which has shown occasional flashes of brilliance but has otherwise mostly been ridden with the kind of extreme conservatism Tony Sparano is famous for, might actually flourish if freed from Sparano’s constraints. But at what cost? Ross has to ask himself if he’d rather go 0-16 and end up with the number one draft pick and potential franchise quarterback Andrew Luck to show for it, or go 2-14 and end up taking yet another lineman with the third overall pick. We’re not talking about actually tanking games or losing on purpose, mind you. It’s just that by standing pat and allowing the incompetent and flailing Sparano to coach out the rest of the season, it’s a virtual guarantee that the losses will keep on coming despite his best coaching efforts. Fret not for Sparano, who will continue getting paid his full salary to sit at home through about the year 2015, even after he’s fired. The only question is whether the Dolphins fire him right now in an attempt to make this failed season a little less embarrassing in the history books and a little less painful for fans, or whether to allow him to keep on failing for another ten games in order to “Suck for Luck.”

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.

Sparano: Miami Dolphins will play every 2011 game like it’s preseason [satire]

Upon winning his first two preseason games after having spent most of the offseason on the verge of being fired due to poor declining team performance in each of the past few seasons, Miami Dolphins head coach Tony Sparano has announced that his strategy for the upcoming 2011 regular season will be to coach every game like it’s still the preseason.

“If a strategy is working, by philosophy is not to mess with it,” said Sparano after his Dolphins easily defeated an overmatched Carolina team in a preseason game after having beaten Super Bowl contender Atlanta in the previous unofficial contest. “After all, I can’t afford to get fired.” Sparano says his strategy for the regular season opener against the New England Patriots will employ the same strategy used to beat Carolina: he’ll play the starters in the first half, then switch to second stringers in the third quarter. In addition, scrubs who don’t belong on the roster will be kept around for fourth quarter duty. He also plans to allow any starters who fear they might get injured during the game to sit out the entire contest instead.

The strategy, Sparano says, will come in the form of not actually trying to win games. By coaching preseason contests primarily to find out who’s going to make the roster and to try out new plays, his Dolphins have thus far amassed a 2-0 preseason record, something he says the team can build on in the regular season by employing the same strategy. When asked how the strategy of not actually trying to win was any different than the way he coached the 2009 and 2010 regular seasons, in which the team typically played for field goals as a strategy, he had no comment.

“Larry Johnson is sticking around too,” says Sparano of the washed up running back who hasn’t run the ball for positive yardage in over two years. “Reggie Bush faces risk of season-ending injury every time he touches the ball, so we’re just going to use Larry all season instead.” When asked just what he’ll be saving Reggie Bush and other injury-prone starters for, he declared “Playoffs!” before quickly adding “Please tell me I didn’t just sound like Jim Mora.”

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.

Miami Mediocre: Heat, Dolphins, Marlins, Panthers at combined .500 for 2010

The four pro sports teams in South Florida are each in the middle of, or have already concluded, a thus-far mediocre season. The promising Miami Heat are just three games over five hundred early in the season, despite the talents of LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh. The Miami Dolphins are one game above even in a topsy-turvy season that’s seen them go through three quarterbacks (so far). The Florida Panthers are two games below par in a mediocre season of their own. And the Florida Marlins finished a season in which they were two games below even and had two different managers before it was over. So just how mediocre have Miami’s pro sports teams been this year? Add up the 2010 records of the Marlins, Panthers, Dolphins, and Heat, and the four franchises combined are exactly at .500 for the year.

That number changes tonight one way or the other as LeBron and the Heat head to his old stomping ground in Cleveland for a game which will, at least symbolically, define the Heat’s early season. And yet it’s the disappointing Heat who not only have the best 2010 record thus far of any of Miami’s four teams, it’s also the Heat with the only realistic chance of bringing home a championship any time soon. The Dolphins are rudderless in the post-Parcells era, with seemingly no one running the franchise and no one sure whether there’s a franchise quarterback in the building. The Panthers are maddening, as usual. And the Marlins are clearly content to simply coast until they make it to their new downtown stadium, dumping expensive players along the way, just as they’ve done every year for as long as anyone can remember.

It’s also the Heat who last brought a pro championship to Miami, as it was a mere four years ago that Wade and Shaquille O’Neal brought South Florida its only basketball ring (can that really have only been four years ago?). The Panthers have done nothing since making the Stanley Cup more than a decade ago. The Dolphins are proud franchise whose last Super Bowl win was nearly forty years ago, begging the question of where the pride comes from. And despite two World Series championships in the past fourteen seasons, the Marlins are such an embarrassing operation that most Dolphins fans would rather the Marlins had packed up and left town years ago, if only so as to avoid having to watch the mediocre Dolphins play football on infield dirt for the first ten weeks of the season.

The reality is that the city of Miami is in a better pro sports situation than would seem. Two of its teams have brought home championships in the past decade, and one of them seems certain to do so again within the next decade. Not bad for a city which, until about twenty years ago, only had one pro sports franchise total. But that doesn’t mean that four mediocre teams is better than one, and in a year in which the four teams and their combined .500 record have come together to be as mediocre as humanly possible, South Florida sports fans have to be wondering which way it goes from here.

Miami Dolphins coach looks three kinds of stupid in bizarre win

The lead story will be that the Miami Dolphins were down to their emergency quarterback, had to use five guys in the role before the day was done, and yet head coach Tony Sparano managed to keep it all together and pull out the strangest of victories. And that’s fair enough, as he has to be given credit for holding his team together during a tumultuous three hour stretch. But look at the big picture, and Sparano’s decisions leading up to the game were nothing short of stupid.

Sparano starting Chad Pennington at quarterback, who has a warrior mentality but a body made of porcelain, was immediately shown to be a stupid move as Pennington suffered a likely career ending shoulder injury on the first play of the game. Another stupid decision was revealed when Chad Henne, who had just Bern fired from the starting quarterback job days earlier, was revealed to be the number two quarterback on the depth chart. With a Pennington injury a strong possibility or even a probability, leaving Henne at #2 meant the guy you just benched was probably going to finish the game one way or the other. So you don’t trust Henne to start but you trust him to finish? If Sparano really believed Henne was the problem, he should have had Henne at #3 this week.

Sparano’s decisions looked even poorer when Henne promptly went into the game on the first drive and put together a nice game for himself, showing that in fact he wasn’t the problem and shouldn’t have been benched in the first place. But before the game was over Sparano’s QB pecking order looked even more wrong as Henne himself got hurt and Tyler Thigpen came into the game and looked great – which showed that if Sparano thought it was that important to bench Henne in the first place, Thigpen should have been the starter. Also, if Thigpen had been named the starter this past week, he’d have had a full week of work with the first string in practice, which now stands as crucial with the Dolphins having another game on Thursday.

Got all that? Yeah, it’s complicated. But the sad part is that right or wrong, the above two paragraphs probably put more thought into the process than Sparano himself did. Benching Henne was an overreactive panic move. Benching him in favor of a porcelain doll like Pennington made no practical sense. And the only reason today’s game hasn’t left him with a three way quarterback controversy with another game in four days is the fact that two of his three quarterbacks are now out with injury for the season. If Thigpen now resurrects the Dolphins season down the stretch, it’s worth keeping in mind that Sparano thought Pennington was a better option – and that Thigpen only even saw the field as a result of something as freakish as two quarterback injuries in the same game, which at this point apparently qualifies as good luck.

Miami Dolphins must fire Tony Sparano if they hope to contend

Should the Miami Dolphins really fire head coach Tony Sparano, a coach with a winning record in his two-plus seasons? Yes, absolutely, even if his team holds on today in Green Bay and regains a winning record for the season. Why? Sparano is simply not head coaching material. It’s one thing to give a first-time head coach time to grow into the job. It’s another to realize that an individual’s makeup is the exact opposite of what being a head coach requires. In no particular order, here are a number of reasons as to why Tony Sparano must go if the Dolphins ever hope to contend:

1. Drive-killing playcalling: Every time the Dolphins running game gets going, they abandon it. Every time quarterback Chad Henne gets into a rhythm, the Dolphins start taking him off the field to run the wildcat. And then on top of it, the wildcat is orchestrated in such an unimaginative way that it no longer works. If Ronnie Brown gets hot running the ball, Ricky Williams subs for him the next drive, and vice versa, meaning that neither back ever gets into a rhythm. The Dolphins have plenty of offensive talent. The problem is they don’t have enough offensive talent to overcome the playcalling, which is a different kind of offensive.

2. You play to win the game: Well, you might, but Tony Sparano doesn’t. He plays not to lose. His team gets up by three points, and he has them playing like they’re up by thirty-three. It’s why his team can never hold a lead; his team is never leading by more than one score. Just how uninterested is Tony Sparano in winning? Watch him on the sideline sometime, after his team’s offense stalls out and has to settle for a disappointing field goal. Sparano is inexplicably pumping his fists, celebrating three points, completely unaware that a field is considered a failure in all cases unless it’s a game-winning fourth quarter kick.

3. Star regression: The few young stars developed in the Sparano-Ireland era have nearly all been regressing this year. Henne shows all the potential in the world, but can’t stop giving the game away. Vontae Davis and Sean Smith, who by now should be the best cornerback tandem in the league, have both gone backwards this season. For Davis it’s been a subtle regression, but Smith has faded so badly he’s been benched. In favor of, stunningly, Jason Allen.

4. Jason Allen: The poor guy gets his own category. He’s a first-round bust from a previous regime who’s found a way to remain on the team by playing his heart out on special teams. But in his several years with the Dolphins, he’s proven he’s not a competent starting cornerback. For every interception he comes up with, he gets burned several times per game. At this point he’s a known quantity, and a limited one. Yet rather than figuring out how to get Sean Smith and his superstar potential back into fine form, Sparano insists on playing Allen at cornerback, whom fans have affectionately nicknamed “toast” for all the times he gets burned by wide receivers.

5. Not so special teams: The lack of competent special teams personnel isn’t Sparano’s fault per se; Dolphins fans can thank GM Jeff Ireland and his spastic roster moves (which included dumping most of the team’s special teams stars in the offseason) for that. But firing the special teams coach last week, just because fans were demanding it? With a move like that, Sparano is merely pandering to the fans in order to keep the heat off himself.

6. Clock management: Sparano never has figured out how to manage the last few minutes of a game or a half.

7. Timeout: The Dolphins offense and defense have some of their very worst plays after Sparano calls a timeout. It’s almost as if the simple act of going to the sidelines and hearing their head coach speak is enough to deflate the team. The same thing often tends to happen to the Dolphins after an idiotic play call: nearly every special teams gaffe against New England came directly after a drive stalled out due to a head-scratching play call. It’s as if Dolphins players are fine as long as they can pretend Sparano isn’t their head coach – but each time they’re exposed to his bumbling decisions, they’re reminded they have no chance of contending while he’s their coach, and they slip into mental mistakes.

8. You (really do) play to win the game: Speaking of pandering to the fans, here’s all you need to know about Tony Sparano’s coaching philosophy. In one game this year, Sparano attempted to silence grumbling fans by running a long bomb of a passing play on the first play of the game, and yet never went back to the idea again in that game. The next week, Sparano went with another long bomb on the first play of that game, which again failed. The first game, it simply didn’t work. The second game, it didn’t work because everyone in the building knew it was coming. In both cases, it appeared Sparano was attempting to placate Dolphins fans with a token long pass play. Not sure what’s worse: the fact that the coach is calling plays based on what the fans want, or the fact that the coach thinks the only reason you’d ever run a play like that one is to placate the fans.

Not everything that’s wrong with the Dolphins can be placed specifically on Sparano’s shoulders. But in his third season, he’s shown a near total lack of ability to overcome his team’s inherent weaknesses, and he continues to find ways to create additional weaknesses for his team. Sparano’s second season was a losing one. His third season’s only wins have come against teams that were terrible (Buffalo), completely disjointed (Minnesota), or comically injury-depleted (Green Bay). It’s enough to make his rookie season, in which the team went 11-5, look like a fluke. The problem is that, while Jeff Ireland has had a hit and miss career as Dolphins GM, he’s assembled just enough talent that the Dolphins will win just enough games each season on talent alone, despite the lack of competent head coaching, that Sparano won’t likely be fired nearly as quickly as he should be.

For Dolphins fans, it’s a repeat of the Dave Wannstedt era, in which fans realized Wannstedt was not head coaching material by about year three, but he managed to win just enough games to ruin four more Dolphins seasons, thanks to the defensive talent that Jimmy Johnson left behind.

Dolphins fans can only hope that Sparano doesn’t get seven incompetent years himself. By all rights he should be fired by the end of this season. But the man who hired him in the first place, Bill Parcells, just inexplicably retired last month. It’s as if Parcells concluded he’d made a mistake, realized Sparano would have to be fired by the time this season is over, and chose to quit rather than have to be the one to fire him.

Dolphins-Packers: Miami healthy not special, Green Bay turns to subs

The Miami Dolphins and Green Bay Packers face off today in a game which sees the teams going in two different directions – health wise, at least. While the Dolphins are set to finally have linebacker Channing Crowder available for the first time all season, the Packers are looking at playing without linebacker Clay Matthews or for that matter Ryan Grant, Jermichael Finley, or Nick Barnett. The good news for Green Bay is that it will likely have quarterback Aaron Rodgers available despite the concussion he suffered in last week’s game.

While Rodgers has become essentially a proven commodity in the few years since he took over for Brett Favre, Dolphins quarterback Chad Henne is still trying to find his place. The young QB managed to look as brilliant as he did confounding last week in what ended up being a blowout loss to the Patriots. But most of New England’s forty-one points game from what was one of the best (or depending on your point of view, one of the worst) special teams performances in the history of professional football. Just how bad were the Dolphins special teams in their last game? The team fired special teams coach John Bonamego during the bye week.

In a season in which no one team looks even close to being bulletproof, both Miami and Green Bay are difficult to figure out. The Dolphins are undefeated on the road yet winless at home, which means they might be relieved to be on the road. The Packers, at their best, look like strong Super Bowl contenders. But at other times they’ve looked just as vulnerable as the Dolphins.

Potential key matchup: Dolphins rising star cornerback Vontae Davis against Packers veteran star wide receiver Donald Driver (if he even plays, as he’s also on the injury list). Then again, the rash of injuries on the Packers side means that the performance of their backups could be more pivotal than anything either team’s starters do.

Dolphins-Patriots MNF tonight: the past vs. the present vs. the future

Tonight’s Monday Night Football game between the Miami Dolphins and New England Patriots will see a face-off of the past, present, and future of both franchises and the rivalry – and we don’t mean that generically. The rivalry itself is based on a past trend in which the Patriots dominated the league – or at least the AFC East – and yet now it’s no longer even clear where the Pats rank within the division’s top three teams. The Pats-Dolphins rivalry has also, in the more recent past, seen the Wildcat come into play. In fact, the Dolphins first debuted the Ronnie-Brown-as-quarterback Wildcat against the Patriots in 2008, and blew them out that day as a result. But more recently, the Wildcat has become more of a yardage-losing drive-killer for the Dolphins than anything else, with Miami fans now debating whether it should be put to rest entirely.

Meanwhile, individual players for both teams also find themselves dealing with the present, trying to carve out a future, or attempting to live up to past glory. There’s no debating that Tom Brady is one of the top quarterbacks of his generation, and that’s as true at present as it was a few years ago, but it’s been years since he last won the Super Bowl. Veteran receiver Randy Moss is playing out what might be his final season with the team. The Patriots defense is young and may not be strong enough to allow the team to contend until a little bit further into the future.

On the other side of the field, the Dolphins are going with third year quarterback (second year starter) Chad Henne, who often looked brilliant last week against rival QB Mark Sanchez and the hated New York Jets, but couldn’t quite get it done with the game on the line. Wide receiver Brandon Marshall is in his first year with the Dolphins and, after a 160-plus yard effort last week, finally looks like he could be the receiver the team has been seeking for the past decade. And while the Dolphins have one of the best one-two running back tandems in the league in Ronnie Brown and Ricky Williams, it’s not clear whether either veteran will still be with the team next year.

So who wins the game tonight? It could come down to a battle of rising young quarterback vs. decorated veteran quarterback. Or it could come down to which team’s defense, both of which looked questionable last week, puts on a stronger show. It could come down to a battle of running backs – or who knows, perhaps the Wildcat might again become a factor in this rivalry. Most pro football games have a clearly identifiable key matchup upon with the fate of the game will likely depend. But with tonight’s Dolphins-Pats game, it’s not so clear.

app review: Madden NFL 11 for iPhone

It’s become extremely clear this month that the iPhone has come into its own as a gaming platform. At the same time that Sony is releasing ads criticizing the quality of iPhone games, EA has released its second iteration of its flagship Madden franchise for the iPhone. Last year’s Madden game set the bar very high, but as with any Madden game released on a platform after the first, the question remains whether this year’s version is any more than a roster update compared to last year’s version.

If you don’t own any Madden games for your iPhone and you’re wondering if Madden measures up to the console versions, it does, with some limitations. You’re not going to confuse the iPhone version of Madden with the 360 or PS3 versions, but it’s definitely at least as good as you might expect the iPhone version to be, if not better.††Don’t hesitate to pick this up, even at the current price of $8, if you want a football game for your iPhone and don’t yet have one.

If you’re considering upgrading from Madden 10, however, that question is a bit more complicated. Most of the gameplay in Madden 11 is fairly identical to Madden 10 (rosters aside, obviously), which, on the whole, is a good thing. For instance, passing is still done by tapping on the receivers, and the Action Control system that lets the player slow down the action temporarily, a highlight of the original iPhone Madden, returns for Madden 11. However, what device you own and your play style could make the difference between a purchase and a pass when it comes to this year’s incarnation.

The most obvious change in this year’s version is the GameFlow system, which replaces the old Ask Madden system for having the computer suggest plays (which was missing from Madden 10 on the iPhone anyway). With GameFlow turned on, you are never even presented with a play calling screen; the game just advances from play to play automatically, while continuing to provide the option to either change the play entirely or draw hot routes for your players on the screen to adjust the play. Turning GameFlow on and off is as easy as flipping a switch on the screen in between plays.

In theory, GameFlow is fantastic, especially on the iPhone where you likely don’t have a ton of time to play in the first place. I also like it a lot more on defense, where I’m less confident with/interested in strategy than I typically am on offense.††In practice, however, it seems to skew very heavily toward running plays, which makes sense for some teams but not others. For instance, I play as the Patriots, and giving the ball to Laurence Maroney instead of Tom Brady for three out of four plays would have the fans in Foxborough screaming for blood. What’s more, I found scrolling through plays with GameFlow off on the sluggish side, which can be frustrating. That said, if you really just want to play Madden like an arcade game, GameFlow is a great addition to the game.

On the defensive side, Madden 11 adds Total Defensive Control, accessible by a button in the bottom center of the screen once the play starts. Pressing this button pauses the game and allows the player to either direct each player on the defense either where to run or queue up a button action (jump, swat, dive for a tackle, etc.). I do like this feature, because the standard Madden style of defense (switch to the closest player and then try to intervene in the split second before they get the ball) has never really worked for me. It can be kind of overwhelming to try to decide what eleven people should do on every play, but I do like having the additional option, and it does add a bit more realism on the defensive side.

The graphics are improved to take advantage of the iPhone 4′s Retina Display, and the difference is very noticeable. The player models are much clearer (if a bit on the blocky side) and you can even see individual fans in the stands instead of just a multicolored animation. I actually fired up Madden 10 to see how it looks on my iPhone 4 and it hurt my eyes in comparison. So for iPhone 4 owners, upgrading is worth it for the graphics alone.There are still some issues with the animations, though; it often seems like the players don’t quite collide properly on tackles, and some of the reception animations aren’t clear whether the ball was caught or not.

The sound is still a weak point of Madden, unfortunately. Though the game has supplemented Madden and Cris Collinsworth with Gus Johnson, the commentary still is really inadequate. You’ll hear the same few lines over and over again, even within a single game, and it’s even wrong, occasionally. Play by play is understandably difficult to do at all, and even more difficult to do well, especially given the space constraints of the iPhone. That said, however, it’s jarring enough in its current incarnation that it’s almost worth just leaving it out altogether if it can’t be done better than it is currently.

So should you buy this first “roster update” version of Madden for the iPhone? Again, if you don’t own Madden 10, absolutely; this is a full featured football game to rival those on other portable gaming platforms for one third of the price of a comparable version on the DS or PSP, and you don’t even need to carry around a separate device to play it. Similarly, if you own an iPhone 4 or are a casual player, then the new features (Retina graphics and GameFlow, respectively) make this version of Madden a giant leap beyond its predecessor. If you don’t fall into any of these categories, then it’s really a toss up. But even just as a roster update, you’re still getting a current, full version of Madden for less than you would pay for last year’s version on other gaming platforms, so it’s not nearly as bad as, say, a $60 roster update on the 360 or PS3. If you didn’t like last year’s version of Madden for the iPhone, this year’s version won’t change your mind, but otherwise, Madden 11 improves on the formula enough to be worth a purchase for more than just this year’s rosters.

Madden NFL 11 for iPhone is in the iTunes App Store for $7.99

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.

Miami Dolphins draft strong safety

Miami Dolphins can breathe easy – perhaps – as the team has selected safety Reshad Jones out of Georgia in the fifth round to take the place of veteran Gibril Wilson who was cut earlier in the offseason after one disastrous season after having been signed as a high profile free agent. The Dolphins traded with the Rams to get their hands on the pick, which was their second of the round, the first having been acquired in the Ted Ginn trade. While fifth round picks are far from sure bets to become quality NFL starters, Jones may provide some hope at the team’s one remaining glaring position of weakness, which was a consistent problem throughout the 2009 season. Free agency is also an option for the position.

Miami Dolphins draft fills all their needs (except one)

The Miami Dolphins used to seemingly be involved in a different draft each year than the rest of the NFL. They’d take Ted Ginn Jr. in the first round when he would likely have still been available in the third, only to declare that they had drafted the entire Ginn family. They’d pass on future hall of famed Ray Lewis to take John Avery, who went on to be the MVP of the XFL; they’d skip over Anquan Boldin to take some linebacker whose name no one can recall who had bad knees at the time; they once took Jamar Fletcher (who?) over Drew Brees and then later passed up an opportunity to sign Brees via free agency (he went on to win a little something called the Super Bowl with the Saints). But with Bill Parcells now running the franchise, the NFL Draft is now no longer one of the worst days of the year for Dolphins fans – even though this past weekend did involve the team drafting three players that most fans had likely never heard of.

Ask any educated Miami fan what the team’s biggest needs were heading into the draft, and after they instinctively twitched and shouted “wide receiver!” you could remind them that Brandon Marshall had just been acquired from the Denver Broncos, after which they’d ponder the question and calmly rattle off three weak positions: safety, outside linebacker, and nose tackle.

Two out of three ain’t bad. In the first round the team identified the defensive end they wanted, realized they could still get him several picks later, traded down, and got Jared Odrick near the end of the round. Turns out their master plan is to shift existing defensive end Randy Starks to nose tackle (or so team officials said yesterday), use Odrick in his place at end, and solved that problem – along with picking up a second round pick in the trade which would allow them to fill another hole. Then, as the draft went into day two, some fans declared their desire for the team to pick playmaker Sergio Kindle, but Parcells and company decided that Kindle’s four knee surgeries was one too many for their comfort level, so they went with Koa Misi instead. And now they’ve got their playmaking outside linebacker to take the place of the aging Jason Taylor, who left for the hated New York Jets, and Matt Roth who was booted during the middle of last season.

Then the Dolphins went into the third round, and again fans stared at their televisions hoping the team would fill the hole at safety left when the team cut Gibril Wilson – actually some would argue that the hole was there all season, as Wilson’s poor play was visible from every seat in the stadium – but instead the team used their third pick to shore up their offensive line (named John Jerry – we were briefly concerned that the team might have drafted John Kerry . Fair enough; the team has plenty of talent on the line, but enough of those players turned out to be injury-prone last year that at one point during the season, the head coach was spotted on the sideline teaching a backup lineman how to play center.

Except the team still doesn’t have a safety. The Dolphins still have several draft picks remaining in the lower rounds this weekend, so perhaps they’ll pick up a couple of them and hope one of them turns out to be starter material. Or perhaps they’ll have to wait until June 1st, when some players from other teams become available via free agency.

For the Dolphins to be contenders this year, it’s likely that Odrick, Misi, Brandon Marshall, free agent inside linebacker acquisition Karlos Dansby, and whoever they end up acquiring at safety will all have to work out this season; years of bad drafting, bad signing, and bad trades prior to the Parcells era still have the team in a position where it can’t afford more than a minimum of personnel mistakes. Just ask Gibril Wilson.

2010 NFL Draft second round: what we learned

The second round of the 2010 NFL Draft is playing out just as unpredictably as last night’s first round. As it turns out, no one traded up to take a quarterback; there was no stampede to acquire Sergio Kindle, and some teams aren’t as interested in their future as they are in their present…

Bill Parcells hates injuries: We’ve known this about him going back to his New York Giants days, but he apparently hasn’t softened any on the matter over the years. After jettisoning excellent yet increasingly oft-injured outside linebacker Jason Taylor (who was always willing to play injured but age was catching up with him), Parcells’ Miami Dolphins passed up the opportunity to take replacement outside linebacker Sergio Kindle at #12 by trading down, then passed on Kindle again at #28 when they took a tackle, and then as if to drive the point home further, the passed on him again at #40 when they took Koa Misi, another outside linebacker. Why? Simple enough: Kindle has had four knee surgeries.

No one thinks they need a quarterback: Despite the abundance of lousy quarterback play in the bottom half of the league last year, thirty of the league’s thirty-two teams decided they didn’t need help at the position badly enough to take either Jimmy Clausen or Colt McCoy in the first round – or to trade up to the first pick of the second round. Clausen eventually went to the Panthers with pick #48. With all the deck-shuffling of quarterbacks so far in the offseason, it does make sense: the Redskins think they have their guy in new acquisition Donovan McNabb; the Eagles are betting Kevin Kolb is their future; the Cardinals have to finally find out what they’ve got in Matt Leinart this year; and so on. Most of the teams with questions at quarterback are content to wait for the answer internally this season rather than trying to answer it now with a high pick.

Vikings want to win now: So the Minnesota Vikings passed on Clausen and McCoy late in the first round by trading down, leaving some to suspect that they would take one of them with the second pick of the second round – didn’t happen. Then after Clausen was taken at #48, the Vikings traded up to #51 – did the suddenly realize there was only one blue chip-ish quarterback left and decided they wanted McCoy right then and there? No, they traded up to take a running back. It’s possible that the Vikings have targeted a sleeper QB pick that they know they can get in a later round. It’s equally possible that with Brett Favre likely not coming back for more than one season (or an outside chance of two), the Vikings want to do everything they can to win it all while that window is still open, and that doesn’t involve using a high draft pick on a quarterback who won’t be able to help them until after Favre retires.

Roger Goodell is a showman: Moving the draft to prime time and giving it the feel of a Chris Berman-commentated Oscar ceremony was one thing. But the NFL Commissioner took it to another level by having Super Bowl winning New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees come onstage and announce his team’s pick at the end of the first round. Goodell was far from done, however; on day two, Jim Brown took the stage on behalf of the Cleveland Browns, Dan Marino announced the Dolphins pick, John Randle drafted for the Vikings, and Ravens future hall of famer Ray Lewis took to stage to draft Sergio Kindle.

No word on whether the forty-eight year old Dan Marino is considering unretiring now that the the Dolphins are set to simultaneously have both a number one receiver and a solid defense for the first time since the 1970′s.

Note: there are still a few picks left in the second round at the time of this writing; more surprises could still happen (although the Seahawks appear to be the only team remaining in the second round who might take McCoy.) Most of the top-shelf talent is already off the board, but you never know…

With the 12th pick in the NFL Draft, the Miami Dolphins take… nobody.

You’re killing me, Bill Parcells. Or is it Jeff Ireland? Or maybe Tony Sparano? Or perhaps it’s Tony Soprano running the Dolphins this week, after the ruthless way in which the franchise just said goodbye to Jason Taylor? Whoever is in charge of the Miami Dolphins 2010 draft war room tonight, they’re killing me – because I just watched an hour and a half of dumper teams making their picks while I waited for slot number twelve to come around so I could find out who the Dolphins decided to take. And after waiting all that time, it turns out they took no one.

Miami instead traded the pick to the Philadelphia Eagles [I think] who used it to select [I can't remember] and in exchange the Dolphins got the 28th pick in the draft, plus the 40th (plus a fourth rounder). Which means I’ve got to watch most of the rest of this draft tonight, which last thirty-two picks, just to find out who the Dolphins end up taking. Sure, I could just read about it in the Miami newspaper’s website later on, but what would fun would that be?

Here’s the thing though: it’s the smart move. The Dolphins need to fill three holes in this draft: nose tackle, safety, and outside linebacker (not necessarily in that order). And since they already jettisoned their second round pick to acquire Brandon Marshall from the Denver Broncos in order to fill the massive hole they had at wide receiver, they were stuck looking at only being able to fill one of their three most pressing remaining needs with that top pick in anything approaching an assured fashion. But now, thanks to the trade, the Dolphins will likely be able to fill two of their three holes. My gut tells me that at least one of the player they were looking at with the number twelve pick will still be there at twenty-eight anyway. But then maybe that’s just the fan in me speaking.

Buffalo Bills are the new New York Jets

I remember years ago back when it seemed like the New York Jets wanted to acquire nothing but tight ends in the draft. Every year they’d take another tight end in the first round, or so it seemed. And the team was never any good as a result. As a lifelong fan of the Miami Dolphins, the Jets’ most hated rival, I loved seeing it (that’s not mean spirited; for your team to have a successful season, it helps if another team in your division sucks). Now it seems like the Buffalo Bills, another team in the Dolphins’ division, has no interest in acquiring anything other than running backs. Marshawn Lynch might be their best player, and yet they just used their high first round draft pick to take CJ Spiller, another running back. Hey, works for me.

The funny part is, the Dolphins have demonstrated how to successfully employ two star running backs (Ronnie Brown and Ricky Williams) at the same time – but they’ve gone to sometimes extreme measures to get them on the field simultaneously, including lining Brown up at quarterback in the Wildcat and even putting Williams under center now and then.

It’s always fun to watch the draft and rationalize how your team is the one making the smart draft picks (unless you’re a Raiders fan, in which there’s no rationalizing it) while coming up with reasons why the studs that have just been drafted by your team’s rivals must somehow represent bad moves that will hurt them and help your team.

Speaking of which, I’ll likely be getting behind whoever the Dolphins end up drafting. Unless, of course, they use the first round to acquire yet another running back.

The risk well taken

On a day that found me a few thousand miles away from headquarters, and on one of the few days in 2009 that I didn’t have my mind focused on work at all, I actually learned the same lesson twice in the span of a few hours while attending a Dolphins game in Miami – and interestingly enough, that lesson applies squarely to what you can expect out of iProng in 2010. Allow me to try to explain.

Of the twenty-seven issues of iProng Magazine we released this year, the majority of them featured musicians on the cover who were widely considered household names at the time. It’s something we’re often congratulated for, but the truth is that even famous folks tend to make themselves available when they’ve got something to promote; our job, then, is to figure out which folks are worth talking to at any given time, based on the quality and significance of their latest project, how interesting the conversation with them is likely to be, and most importantly, how satisfied you guys are going to be after having read the interview. That last part might theoretically suggest that we go out and get the biggest name possible for the cover of each issue. But as it turns out, the relatively few times we’ve gone in the other direction have ended up netting us (and by extension, you) some of the biggest payoffs.

Some of these decisions have been very, very easy for us. The chance to interview Carlos Santana and put him on the cover? Your pet dog has enough IQ points to know enough to greenlight that one. Black Eyed Peas? Ditto. And sometimes you admittedly get a little lucky. Lady Gaga and Katy Perry were both pitched to me before their debut albums had even been released, the album advance I’d been sent having caught my ear in both instances, and in the relatively brief period in between conducting the interview and the scheduled publication date, each had risen quickly enough that putting them on the cover at that point was not that difficult of a decision – even though in both instances we were the first magazine to put either one of them on the cover.

Perhaps the biggest risk we took in all of 2009 came back in November when we decided to put a then-little-known guitarist on our cover by the name of Orianthi. It’s not like we discovered her or anything – by that time she’d already been tagged as the “next great guitarist” by Carlos Santana, Carrie Underwood, Steve Vai, and Michael Jackson – but I’d be willing to bet that at the time we published that issue, more than ninety percent of our readers looked at the cover and wondered who she might be.

Yet since that time, I’ve gradually received more feedback about Orianthi than just about any other cover we’ve ever done. And it was all positive; no one wrote in to complain that we’d finally put a musician on the cover who wasn’t famous. Instead, the feedback was along the lines of “Thanks for telling me about her” and “Glad I heard about her from you early on” and even “I wondered who that blonde guitar player was in the Michael Jackson movie, thanks for filling me in.”

Of course the Orianthi cover was greenlighted in the first place because we thought she’d probably be a household name eventually. And while I’m often too far on the inside of the industry beltway to be able to judge just how far into “household name” territory someone has or hasn’t reached, it was a fairly obvious indicator today when it was time for the national anthem at the Dolphins game and onto the field walked Orianthi with her guitar.

The payoff for you is that, as our readers, you get to hear about (and hear from) someone like that before just about anyone else does. And the payoff for us is that we get to make you happy. But it’s a risk, and while I’m very proud of what we delivered to you in 2009, that’s the kind of risk that we didn’t take as often this past year as I wish we had. Of course the only reason for not taking those risks is that you don’t want others looking back later on and second-guessing why you put someone on the cover who was ultimately never heard from again. But that’s nothing more than ego, isn’t it?

As I was chewing this over, as if on cue, the other half of today’s lesson presented itself near the end of the game. Football coaches are routinely lambasted by observers if they go for it on fourth down and don’t convert it; in fact one of the game’s most accomplished coaches was roasted earlier this season when he went for it in a scenario where all the math in the world said that it was the only logical decision. Punting would have all but guaranteed a loss, going for it on fourth down gave his team a greater than 50-50 chance of winning, so there was no way anyone could claim that he made the wrong decision – yet everyone did just that. And this is a guy who’s won several Super Bowls this decade.

So sure enough, the Dolphins coach finds himself in a situation late in the game today where going for it on fourth down would have given him a chance to win but punting basically guaranteed he would lose, and yet he punted anyway. How certain was it that this cowardly call cost his team the game? After the punt, half the fans in the stadium got up and left, because there was nothing else to watch at that point. It was a logicless enough call as to border on temporary insanity, one that effectively ended the Dolphins season today, and one that gained the coach nothing beyond being able to dodge outside scrutiny. If he’d gone for it on fourth down and failed, the armchair analysts would have lit him up for it. So instead he punted, knowing that he’d lose for sure, simply because he knew he’d take less blame for losing in that manner than if he’d had the guts to make the move that would’ve given his team its only chance to win.

My learned lesson for 2010, then: don’t ever be that guy. Don’t ever back down from taking an editorial risk worth taking, simply out of fear of looking foolish later on if the risk ends up not paying off. In the span of three hours today I saw someone else not have the courage to take a risk that needed to be taken, with the result being that a year’s worth of his team’s effort went down the toilet – and on that same field I saw evidence that one of my own relatively few major editorial risks in 2009 is going to pay off for us in spades. So if a risk is worth taking in 2010, and the only downside is the potentially wounded pride of guessing wrong, then we’re going to go for it. We owe you that much.

And it’s not just about who goes on the cover, either. One of the reasons why we began releasing issues on a more frequent schedule in late 2009 was so we could push more content out the door without making each individual issue too long. Our plan is to use that extra flexibility to bring you more kinds of content in each issue so that you’ll find the issue worthwhile and entertaining overall even if you’re not a fan of who’s on the cover – or perhaps haven’t yet heard of them

There’s more coming down the pike and it’s a long year, so I won’t tease you with too much future-speak that we’re not ready to put in front of your faces yet. Don’t worry, we’ve got interviews with plenty more household names, living legends, and super-hot artists coming your way throughout the year. But don’t be surprised if you see us doing more things that surprise you.

Darius Rucker interview

iProng Magazine sits down with Darius Rucker, the chart-topping country star who also happens to be the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish for a one on one interview at the Capitol Records building in Hollywood…

interview by Bill Palmer

Rock fans know Darius Rucker as the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish, while country fans are more likely to recognize him as the guy whose new solo album Learn To Live has been in the top five on the iTunes country charts since it was released and whose first single off the record went all the way to number one. But for one recent sunny winter afternoon, I knew Darius Rucker as the laid-back guy sitting next to me in a conference room at the Capitol Records building in Hollywood as we chatted about everything from what happened to Hootie, to how he got off the ground as a country artist, to the shared pain we’ve both felt over the past decade as fans of the Miami Dolphins…

I was a little bit taken aback when I heard you were doing a country album, but then I went back and listened to some of the older Hootie, and there’s always been a country vibe there for you, hasn’t there?



Yeah, we’ve always had that feel. We’ve always had some country-influenced stuff on our records. And that was probably one of the reasons that the last couple records I thought about maybe just going country and playing country songs, because we had so much of that influence. When we sat around and jammed sat around and jammed with each other we still just played country and bluegrass songs. And so it was just like you know, let’s take it all the way. But they were right. We’re a rock band. That’s what we do. So I have no regrets. Everybody’s happy.



Is that why you felt it was time to break the band up, that you didn’t want to put out a country Hootie album, or was that more about being a solo artist?

I wanted to put out a country record and I knew I was gonna have to do that myself. And so I didn’t want to put out a Hootie country record. I didn’t want to put out a record that sounded like us with lap steel. That wasn’t my intention. And so it was like, not even that we’re broke up so much, it’s just that I knew I couldn’t tour with Hootie in the summer and try and do this country thing. And so it was like guys, we’re gonna take a break for a long time because I just want to do this for awhile. I want to make records and tour, and see what I can do in the country world.

How did they take it when you broke the news to them?

It wasn’t me. It was somebody else in the band who called the meeting, that said they wanted to take a break. It was just a perfect timing thing for me, cause I knew that this was coming along, and I had signed a deal with Capitol and things were gonna happen, and I was wanting to make a career move, not just do a record, I wanted to do a lot of records. And I was like yeah, that’s cool. I wasn’t more like “hey you guys, we’re not gonna play cause I’m doing this country thing.” It was more like “hey I want to do this” and another guy was like “yeah I’m kind of tired of doing it every summer too, I want to take some time off.” So it was a cool thing for everybody.

You’ve sold tens of millions of albums, you’ve got the famous voice and the famous name. But did you really think that you could have this kind of chart success? You’ve already got a number one single and a top five country album.

No, I didn’t think I would have that kind of success. This is the way I made the plan and the way I saw it, and the way [producer] Frank Rogers and I even really kind of talked about it, is that we wanted [Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It], we thought it was the perfect first introduction because it was a cool radio song, it was really country, nice theme of growing up. It didn’t show me as trying to be some kind of twenty-four year old kid. It was just a cool tune. And we hoped it would get in the top fifteen. And we figured if it got in the top ten, then man, we really could put out more singles. And it was a thing that we looked at where we were trying to grow a career. The single is probably not gonna be number one, and the next one is probably not gonna be number one, but maybe on number three we can see what happens and try to work it. And so it was just like let’s work this.



So when it started to get close to number one when it came out, I still can’t believe it. And I still think people are kidding sometimes when they say it, you know? Because new guys don’t come around. You’ve seen what everybody’s done. I watched a lot of records, really good records, songs I thought were great songs, get to around fifteen in the chart and just, that’s it. Then it starts to freefall. And mine kept growing. At some point you ask yourself “who’s playing it more? How can somebody be playing it more than they were playing it last week?”


How many of the people that are buying this record do you think are long-time fans of yours that are just following you into this genre, vs. how many of them are long-time country fans?

I think it’s a really great mix of both. Some of the people that are buying it because it’s my record, are people that might have not listened to country music before, but now they listen to country radio because my song’s playing on it. But while they’re listening for my song they hear ten other songs that they go “wow, this is country radio?”

On the record you sing about turning forty. You’re forty-two now. How are your forties playing out so far?

I love it. I had a great time in my twenties and thirties playing in Hootie and the Blowfish and partying and doing the things we did and having a great time. But I’ve gotta tell you, the forties, being married and having three kids and trying to see them and also balance trying to have some success in this crazy music business, I can’t say I’m having more fun or anything, but I can tell you that I’ve never been more content or happy in my life than where I am at forty-two. I just love being who I am.

On “If I Had Wings” you’ve got Vince Gill and Alison Krauss singing on there, and Brad Paisley is playing guitar on another track. Did you already know these country stars from beforehand, or are these all new friends?

I knew Vince. When I wrote “If I Had Wings” with Frank Rogers and Rivers Rutherford, and Frank produced the record, and write after we wrote it I said to Frank, “I want Vince.” And I thought I might be able to get Vince because of the golf tie, we both play golf in tournaments together, and I consider Vince a friend. So I thought we’d get him.



And so Frank saw him at a gym, and this is the difference from rock and pop. If I saw some rock star at a gym and said “hey man I’d love you to come play on my record,” they’ll say “yeah” but then they’ll tell their manager who’ll call my manager and by the time it’s all over it ain’t gonna happen. But he saw Vince Gill in the gym and just asked him, “Darius has got this song he’s crazy about and he really keeps talking about you singing on it, will you come sing?” And Vince Gill, who’s won twenty Grammys or whatever he’s won, says “yeah I’ll be there in a couple of days” and two days later there’s Vince Gill on my record.



And then after I hear Vince on it, I’m on my horse and I go “Alison Krauss would really be crazy on this,” and he sees Alison in a restaurant and says “Vince sang on this Darius song that I’m doing and Darius would love you to sing on it.” And she says “yeah I’ll be there in a couple days.” No one calls their manager, they just come down and they sing, we’ll deal with that later. That’s pretty cool.



“Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It” is the first number one country song by a black guy since Charlie Pride twenty-five years ago. Do you think about it much in those terms?



I didn’t until it started to happen. When we got in the top twenty somebody mentioned it to me, and I went really? Cause I thought you know, Cleve Francis, Cowboy Troy, Trini Triggs, I thought one of those guys had a top twenty hit in the last twenty-five years. And it got crazy when it got to number one, the thing that’s crazy to me is somebody pointed out that it was twenty-five years to the week that Charlie Pride had his last number one.


I saw you co-hosted ESPN’s Mike and Mike in the Morning.



Yeah, broadcast journalism was my major in college. My fallback job was being a sports journalist. That’s what I wanted to do. That was going to be my thing if I didn’t make it in music. And I’ve done some shows, I had hosted with Dan Patrick before and stuff. And a friend of mine had a connection up there and asked if I wanted to do it. It’s just something that I’ve always wanted to do. Even my plans, after this country thing is over in ten to fifteen years, is I want to sit around Charleston and have my own sports talk show.



And so they asked me to do it, and the thing that amazed me is I loved every minute of it, and I really hope to goodness they call me back to do it again, because the thing that was amazing to me is how at the end of four hours, cause you talk for four hours, at the end of it I couldn’t believe how fast it went.


Were you on with one of the Mikes?



Nah, it was me and Erik Kuselias. It was great and actually, Mike Golic called in cause we played the Notre Dame golf tournament together a few years before. Those guys are great guys, and it’s one of my favorite shows, a show that I watch every morning. My kids have a joke for it, they try to say as many “Mike and Mikes” as they can before they say “in the morning.”



And so I’m sitting there on Mike and Mike, I’m hosting, and Tiger is a pretty good friend of mine, there I’m naming dropping but he’s a pretty good friend of mine, and this is how big Mike and Mike is. We’re sitting there and Tiger texts me, “I wake up this morning, I turn on my favorite show and I have to see your ugly mug?”



Is it different now that you’ve got the kids, do you have to structure your touring around that now?



Yeah, everything’s different. That’s also one of the great perks of being in the country world is country guys religiously, and I like to think of the family thing, I think it’s a couple reasons they do this. I think they do it cause country people are blue collar people who have to work, and they need to work on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday they might be able to go out and maybe Thursday. So country guys tour from Wednesday to Saturday, and that’s just beautiful to me because that means Saturday night I can get on the bus or get on a plane and fly home, and Sunday morning I wake up with my kids. Monday morning, Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning I’m home with my kids, and then I get back on the road again. That’s just a thing for me that’s a blessing. It’s something that I stress to my management now. I’m not doing the Hootie thing where I go out in May and come back in November. I’m doing it the right way and I’m going to have a family life.



Everything’s different. I mean I used to be a guy who, if we were off for three days, all I could do was think “man, I’m so ready to go back on the road. I’m so ready to go on the road. I want to go on the road.” And now I’m that guy who, I can be playing some of the best shows in the world, and it’s like “man, I’ve got to leave my kids?” But it’s my job, I’ve got to do it. I ain’t skilled to do much else. It’s this or talking on a talk show somewhere for twenty thousand dollars a year.



When you do a show, is it all new stuff or do you mix in some of the Hootie stuff?



Oh, I’m always going to play those Hootie songs. “Let Her Cry” and “Only Wanna Be With You” and “Hold My Hand,” especially “Let Her Cry,” that’s a song I actually play every night that I play. I mean if I’m playing a three-song demo, I should play “Let Her Cry.” That song made my career. That made people go “man, that guy can write a song.”



You’re still going to play a few shows a year with Hootie for charity?



Oh yeah, we’ve got four shows already lined up for March and April, they’re really big shows for us. And there will be another Hootie album, another Hootie tour, sometime down the line. I just don’t know when.



Just not anytime soon.



No time soon. 



Do you think those shows will have a different feel when you play with them now?



I think the one thing about us is we’ve been together about twenty-three years, that when we do get together to play, even the shows we’ve played since the tour ended, it’s just what we do. No matter what everybody does on their own, when we get back together it’s still the four of us doing exactly what we do. And I think that’ll always be that way.



So Hootie’s not dead then.



Nah, we’ll never die. With all the stuff that’s happened to us in the last few years, if we haven’t died yet, we’ll never die.

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