FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'
Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
SEPTEMBER 8, 2013 #Finally! 2013 NFL season is finally here! My counter-intuitive predictions for the 2013 Miami Dolphins season is they stumble to 5-11; Over-valued, under-performing players plus a very tough early schedule may well render Dolphins winless by Bye week in Week 6; USA Today, Dan Patrick and Peter King's Super Bowl picks; Say hello again to our old friend, NFL East Coast/Cowboys bias!; @nfl, @SI_PeterKing, #Lombardi http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2013/09/finally-2013-nfl-season-is-finally-here.html
pmanis09 YouTube Channel: ABC's Monday Night Football, opening (1973), with Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford and Don Meredith. Uploaded on October 16, 2008. http://youtu.be/m8fkMkE2Yjg and over at NBC, largely featuring Dolphins guard Bob Kuechenberg, and with other Dolphins appearing, including Larry Little, Vern Den Herder, Larry Csonka, Bob Griese and at 0:57, the late Jim Mandich, who sadly died almost-two years ago tomorrow...
beaverstuffers YouTube Channel: NFL on NBC, opening (1973).
Yes, 1973, the last year the Dolphins really WERE the best team.
2013 NFL Draft: Another Draft day with Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland squandering opportunities left and right; Give me more playmakers! The best defense is a big lead!; @nfl, @SI_PeterKing, @BuckyBrooks
Another Draft day that Dolphin fans hope will be decisive in changing around the fortunes of a once-proud football franchise that has been plagued for too many years with bad management, uninspiring coaching and mediocre personnel that lacks playmakers and a killer instinct. But look who's in charge?
Since we're all friends here on the blog for the most part, I'm going to fill you in on something you won't be reading elsewhere today on one of the most-magical albeit-unofficial American holidays of the year -the first day of the NFL Draft. Last night after the watching the Miami-area 11 O'clock news, I had to run some errands and hop into the blog's Time Machine, a.k.a. the South Beach Hoosier Time Machine, to finish something I had actually started a few weeks ago, though technically, is actually still in the future many months from now.
You know how it is with time travel, some words only cause more confusion, which is why star dates are so useful.
So anyway, one of the errands involved finally seeing the new upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness that opens in May, which I'll be seeing in-person next month when it opens, on DVD this December, when the Dolphins 2013 season has pretty much played itself out.
Star Trek Into Darkness - Official Trailer #3 (HD) Benedict Cumberbatch I bought it to watch it again and then send it to my mother, who is a longtime Star Trek fan, but not so crazy about going to theaters anymore, unless she comes down here to see my sister and I, in which case we'll watch it at my sister's at some point on her visit.
My plan, then, is to watch it after the NBC Sunday Night Football game if that game is a good one, or, instead of the game if the game is not so interesting.
(Like usual, I'm taping Once Upon a Time, The Good Wife and The Mentalist on the other TV's DVR.)
So, I'm watching the pre-game highlights package and listening to Dan Patrick, Tony Dungy and Bob Costas talk and talk about the various games that took place earlier in the day and sort of wondering what led the Time Machine to this scene of me watching myself lying on the couch, with some newspapers and a can of Coke on the table nearby.
And how is this trip in any way connected to tonight's NFL Draft?
Well, the Dolphins will have the chance tonight to draft and add polish to a dynamic game-breaking player, but because Dolphins well-meaning but misfiring General Manager Jeff Ireland is who he is -there's no changing those spots- he goes the safe route yet again and the player who could be and should be one of the Dolphins biggest stars of the future, will instead drop some more and ply his trade for another team drafting after the Dolphins.
Ah, Jeff Ireland and the Safe Choice!
It almost sounds like the name of a neighborhood band from North Miami Beach circa 1974, a band where the lead singer is the older brother of one of my friends, but his last name really isn't Ireland, but he just likes the way it sounds.
Lots of class!
In the future highlight I see, Dan Patrick prefaces his pithy comment by saying, "Oh, no. Jeff Ireland may want to close his eyes again because Miami passed on this guy."
And there on the TV screen, on TVs of various sizes and shapes all across the country and all across South Florida, the video is showing someone scoring against the Dolphins late in a heretofore close ballgame, and making the big difference in another Dolphin loss.
Because, as always, there are nice dependable players and then there are difference-makers, and the Dolphins have been plagued for the past 15 years by NOT having enough of them on the field on either offense or defense.
It makes me think after watching videos on YouTube of the NFL in the 1970's, the seasons with the games and scores I still remember because I was there in-person at the Orange Bowl for almost every one, that IFJeff Ireland had been the Steelers GM in 1974, he'd have passed on drafting John Stallworth in the fourth round because, well, after all, they already had drafted a very good one out of USC in the first round named Lynn Swann.
So let's draft another offensive lineman!
But given who's making the choice, that offensive lineman is NOT named future Hall of Famer Mike Webster.
Four of the Steeler's first five draft choices eventually are enshrined in the NFL Hall of Fame.
Such is the difference between GMs who are in-the-know and on draft day, literally, in-the-zone, seeing things that others don't see, and then there are nice guys who still have their jobs after doing a consistently mediocre job because the boss doesn't really like to fire people.
What will be written on Ireland's personnel file after his exit interview?
"Dolphins lack of playmakers!"
Here's a hint: offensive linemen aren't playmakers:
Look up the phrase "Dolphins lack of playmakers" on Google Images and tell me whose photo shows up first. Really,.just try it. See, it's not just my opinion, it's an algorithm's learned opinion.
I hope that I'm wrong about this prediction about the Dolphins draft today, and that Ireland, like George Costanza once did, does the exact opposite of what he usually does, but if you know anything about me from reading this blog fairly regularly over the years, and my predictions while at IU and in Chicago and in D.C., you know that I have a ridiculous degree of accuracy when I've had some time to analyze the empirical data, accent the positive, eliminate the negative and throw in some intangibles and just noodle everything through. Three teams on December's Dolphins schedule draft after the Dolphins: the Steelers at 17, the Patriots at 29 and the Jets immediately after the Dolphins draft at 12. Just saying... the best defense is a big lead!
2013 NFL Draft: The perfect strategy for each team to follow
By Bucky Brooks, Analyst, NFL.com and NFL Network Published: April 22, 2013 at 03:57 p.m. Updated: April 23, 2013 at 05:38 p.m.
Above and below, just some of the dozen Chad Henne jerseys that were NOT flying off the shelves at the Aventura Target last year. October 9, 2010 photos by South Beach Hoosier.
Yes, "the Venezuelan Target," home of la bellessima!
The same store that presciently had the Ronnie Brown #23 jerseys on clearance months and months ago, even as the Dolphins were pretending that he would be coming back to the team this year.
Don't you hate it when retail outlets have a better grasp of the obvious with the team than the people who actually work for the team? The so-called experts.
As I've written here for years, and gotten abuse for saying in numerous Herald stories about the Dolphins, developer and Dolphins owner Steven Ross has no business owning the team, and is making the Dolphins a combination of the worst of the worst -the Bengals of the '90's and the Lions of just three years ago.
Ross may be the single-worst NFL owner around, which is really saying something given the miscues and screw-ups of Jacksonville and Carolina's owners.
Hey Mike Dee, how's that Club LIV at the stadium doing?
I've got a lot more to say about the dismal prospects for this once-proud team that has fallen into a black hole, but since today is the first day of training camp, the day that savvy Dolphin fans have been dreading since the lockout started, I'd have been remiss if I hadn't posted this Henne photo, which I've been saving for months just for today's post.
I'll likely have more this weekend, once Matt Moore has arrived from Carolina.
Yes, Matt Moore.
That was their back-up plan, after they refused to take a chance on Ryan Mallette or move up in May's NFL Draft, and then couldn't pull the trigger this week for someone else?
(Patriots snapped Mallette up!)
Yes.
Folks, this year, like a bad move that keeps repeating, Dolphin fans are stuck on the S.S. Titanic and this time, we passengers know the iceberg is out there, but they keep steering right towards it, anyway.
Over-and-over!
For once, almost six months ago, I actually agreed with Armando Salguero.
It’s becoming something of a depressing yearly rite that we look at the Super Bowl teams and think about what might have been for our Dolphins.
If only someone with a functioning brain would have made this or that decision correctly, stuck with this player or that coach, then maybe, we say, fate would have been written differently and that might be our team playing for the Lombardi Trophy on Sunday.
Remember back in the late 1990s when the Patriots went to Super Bowl XXXI with Keith Byars and Jeff Dellenbach? Remember the Packers that eventually won that game boasted Keith Jackson as their tight end?
Remember when the Dolphins discarded all three players?
Last year, Dolphins fans watched in disgust as Drew Brees – the quarterback the Dolphins could have had but passed on twice – helped New Orleans win it all.
This year, the local lament is about coaching talent that got away.
When the Steelers and Packers play this Super Bowl, Dolphins fans can take absolutely zero solace in the fact Mike Tomlin once interviewed for the Miami head coach job and was passed over for someone far less capable of doing the work.
In the first month of 2007, the Dolphins were searching for a coach to replace Nick Saban and identified Tomlin as a rising star worth a visit. They talked to Tomlin. Probed him. Considered him.
Then they passed on him.
A bad choice“Too hip-hop,” one Dolphins employee who had a say in that decision would say of Tomlin weeks later.
Miami went with Cam Cameron instead.
Tomlin interviewed with the Steelers days after his Miami interview. He hadn’t suddenly gotten wiser. He hadn’t magically become a better coach. He was just himself – prepared, pointed, optimistic, realistic.
Tomlin got the job succeeding Bill Cowher.
If the Steelers win on Sunday, that would deliver to Tomlin his second Super Bowl ring as Pittsburgh’s coach and third overall because he’s got one from Super Bowl XXXVII when he was the defensive backs coach for Tampa Bay.
“Every day I go to work, I don’t think about things I have to do, I think about the things I can do to make my men successful,” Tomlin said this week in North Texas. “So I have a servant’s mentality in terms of how I approach my job, and I get that from coach [Tony Dungy].”
A Tony Dungy disciple with a servant’s heart.
Too hip-hop, the Dolphins decided.
I’m not saying Tomlin would have come to Miami and overcome a roster that lacked talent and certainly didn’t compare to Pittsburgh’s. I’m not saying he would have won a Super Bowl already in Miami as he has in Pittsburgh.
I am saying the Dolphins looked in this guy’s eyes and didn’t see what the Rooneys saw when they interviewed Tomlin. They didn’t find out what the Rooney family found out.
That is the difference between being great and being good. Teams such as the Packers and Steelers look at players or coaches other teams have similarly studied and see something special the others miss.
I remember a phone conversation with Saban in 2005 in which he told me he was about to hire Dom Capers. “He’s one of the best defensive coaches out there and he has been for a long time,” Saban said.
Within a couple of years of Capers’ hiring, very few folks in South Florida would have believed that he was among the best at anything. As defensive coordinator of the 2007 Dolphins, he managed to author the worst run defense in the league and the Dolphins ranked 30th in points allowed.
Capers was fired. This year, under Capers’ direction, the Packers were second in fewest points allowed which was an improvement over last season when Capers had his unit ranked seventh in fewest points allowed.
Did Capers become a terrible coach in 2007 after having proved to Saban previously he was an outstanding coach? Did he, becoming suddenly idiotic in 2007, regain his senses the past two years in Green Bay?
Or is it that Capers never stopped being an outstanding coach, but was simply victimized in 2007 by too many injuries ravaging a roster lined with far too little talent?
Great teams often recognize talented people down to their roots. They get a conviction about people. Then they stick to those convictions when crisis hits – which, in the NFL, is every week.
“Panic doesn’t seem to work. Let’s put it that way,” Steelers president Art Rooney II said. “There are enough people that seem to have gone through that mode and our feeling is that you pick good people and you try to stick with them if you have good people. There are ups and downs in any sport, but if you have the right people in place, you’ll always have a chance to be successful and that’s what we do. ”
Do you hear that Tony Sparano doubters?
Is Miami’s current coach the best head coach in the NFL this year? No. His team couldn’t finish strong or win at home.
But did the guy who led the Dolphins to perhaps the most dramatic turnaround in NFL history – going from 1-15 to 11-5 in one year – suddenly becoming incapable of leading and coaching his team?
Formula for successIt speaks well of club owner Stephen Ross that he didn’t knee-jerk and replace Sparano with an unproven Jim Harbaugh last month. The cautious approach might not be rewarded with a title next season, but it gives the Dolphins a chance to have continuity.
And the Steelers, a club with only three coaches since 1969 and having never fired any of them, have proven that continuity can bring success.
The hope is Ross sees something in Sparano, knows something about Sparano that convinced him to keep Sparano even while some were calling for the coach’s head.
The Dolphins have too rarely made us think they know something no one else does. They made us feel that way in 1983 when they picked Dan Marino late in the first round.
They made us feel that way lately when they plucked Cameron Wake out of CFL obscurity and within two seasons saw him go to the Pro Bowl.
But for the couple of decades now, the Dolphins have mostly been among those folks that weren’t aware or didn’t know or missed on a guy by just this much.
That’s not an indictment on the team’s current administration. That’s an indictment on administrations going back to Jimmy Johnson.
The Dolphins missed on Randy Moss, Anquan Boldin, and Brees twice. This isn’t second-guessing or playing the result. All of those players were favored, expected, supposed to join the Dolphins if the brainiacs leading the franchise had been thinking straight.
So where does that leave us?
The hope is Miami folks currently in charge can avoid the curse that obviously befell their predecessors. The hope is the folks running the Dolphins now know something other teams do not.
