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'
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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
7 Days for the Miami Dolphins to end or add to their reputation for terrible NFL Draft selections. A last chance for sanity and common sense for long-suffering Dol-fans? We want Quinton Coples, DE from North Carolina.
Knowing that "only victory would suffice they produced a performance short on ambition, low on energy and looked and acted like a team that knew the game was up."
And he's NOT describing the Miami Dolphins of the past dozen years!
No, BBC Sports chief football writer Phil McNulty was actually describing the flat tire on the road that has been City -Manchester City- of late.
But admit it, his spare and unwavering description reads like the true story of almost every upsetting Dolphins loss of the 21st Century, doesn't it?
Here's what longtime Dolphin fans know from first-hand experience, year-after-year.
Continuing the pattern that has seemingly existed since Joe Thomas left the Dolphins for the Baltimore Colts in the mid-1970's and drafted Bert Jones, Roger Carr, Lydell Mitchell and a host of very talented and exciting players to watch, thereby depriving Don Shula of a savvy partner in planning the Dolphins' future, this year's NFL Draft -starting at 8 p.m. on Thursday April 26th- will likely feature at least 8-10 players who are drafted AFTER the Dolphins first-round selection at #8 who will have more to do with their respective teams winning in 2012 than whomever the Dolphins select with the pick.
That is, unless they inexplicably wind-up with a chance to get their hands on future All-Pro RB Trent Richardson or the player we want.
To me, that particular scenario is likely unless the Browns beat the Dolphins to the overdraft punch and select Texas A& M QB Ryan Tannehill with their pick at #4, in which case they will also probably try to move up via a trade with a team with their #22 first-round pick for the 5th-7th selection, so they can get whatever WR St. Louis doesn't draft, either Oklahoma State's Justin Blackmon or Notre Dame's Michael Floyd, so that Browns QB Colt McCoy will have a game-breaker to thrown to.
The Dolphins have floundered on the field and off for the past decade, and like Los Angeles Dodger fans and their genuine, deep-seated animosity towards soon-to-be-former owner Frank McCourt, which explains why they are NOT using the parking lots that he still owns and a "record number of Dodger fans took public transportation" on Opening Day, to their dismay, Dolphin fans wake-up each morning with a buffoonish villain of an owner of their own in billionaire Stephen Ross,.
As has been written elsewhere in South Florida a million times the past few years, Ross STILL seems far too fixated on extraneous matters fans don't care about, even if female Miami-area TV reporters do. Frankly, most troubling of all, despite his recent PR moves to reach out to Dolphin season ticket holders, Rossseems genuinely unable to learn from his own past mistakes.
Yes, the very same upsetting personality trait that I complain about with great specificity on this blog with respect to how the City of Hallandale Beach, Broward County and the Sunshine State are, seemingly, regularly mis-managed in a world where serious decisions with lasting ramifications need to be made by serious, hard-working people who are focused on both the short-term and long-term. We don't expect perfection, really, we don't.
But we don't think it's unreasonable to keep the financial and policy screw-ups to a bare minimum, to not actually be the rule rather than the exception, and not keep stepping into the same pot-hole over-and-over, like it was just put there.
Except here, at the city, county and state level, people in charge seem to studiously avoid solutions with a demonstrated track record of working in other multiple cities, counties or states, and instead, lamely insist that there's a unique quality here -too warm, too poor, too Hispanic, too car-loving, too many Homeless, too-something- that rules out using those solutions here, so instead, elected leaders form task forces where they appoint friends and cronies, many of whom have serious self-evident conflict-of-interests, and we end up re-inventing the wheel. It's so f-ing frustrating!
Watching Dolphins owner Ross is the same thing, exasperating in the extreme, and unlike many of what is now an army of critics, I actually want Ross to improve as an owner, not just keep screwing-up because it's such a great conversation starter around South Florida that instantly produces shaking heads in people.
Dolphin season ticket sales are at the lowest point they've been in in roughly thirty years, and with what can only be described as an ugly home schedule in an area where something being an "event" is not only well known but common knowledge, even among kids, I believe only the Jets and Patriots home games are likely to sell-out.
Consider this home slate and you'll see why I'm right:
NFL Week 2, Sept. 16: vs. Oakland, 1 p.m.
Week 3, Sept. 23: vs. New York Jets, 1 p.m.
Week 6, Oct. 14: vs. St. Louis, 1 p.m.
Week 9, Nov. 4: at Indianapolis, 1 p.m.
Week 10, Nov. 11: vs. Tennessee, 1 p.m.
Week 12, Nov. 25: vs. Seattle, 1 p.m.
Week 13, Dec. 2: vs. New England, 1 p.m.
Week 15, Dec. 16: vs. Jacksonville, 1 p.m.
Week 16, Dec. 23: vs. Buffalo, 1 p.m.
That means it's probably even-money that six games will NOT be televised in South Florida, this season, which perhaps helps the Hurricanes sell some game tickets to folks who believe Al Golden is selling.
The fact that all Dolphin home games are at 1 p.m., when the South Florida sun will bake you just as soon as look at you, will not help the Dolphins and Ross one bit.
In my opinion, the Dolphins should draft someone with playmaker ability who will play a lot in his first year and could blossom opposite Cameron Wake -UNC DE Quinton Coples, #90, who is 6' 6", 291 pounds, was First Team All-ACC, 24 sacks in 4 years.
For those of you who question his desire, seems that I recall that Dan Marino's senior year wasn't so great, either, but unlike Marino's final year, the Tar Heels' head coach, Butch Davis, was fired just a few weeks before the season started, a lot of starting players were suspended for multiple games, so, the season was essentially over before it ever started.
As regular readers of the blog know, I was at the Dolphins HQ in Davie in 2007 when they passed on selecting Notre Dame QB Brady Quinn at pick #9, after he had already been ignored by his hometown Browns with the #3 pick, and instead drafted Ohio State WR Ted Ginn, Jr., now with the 49ers, which caused the huge crowd of fans in the 'bubble' to explode in anger.
Above, the surprised look says it all. Brady Quinn at the 2007 NFL Draft HQ in NYC when Ted Ginn, Jr.'s name was formally announced. This is prior to Quinn dating U.S. Olympic gymnast captain Alicia Sacramone, whose moxie and spirit have long made her a personal favorite of yours truly. Screenshot by Mario J. Bermudez.
I was actually standing less than 15 feet from Dolphin broadcasters Jimmy Cefalo and the late Jim Mandich and their WQAM producers while they were doing their LIVE coverage of the NFL Draft, and when that announcement was made -and listening to them via my Walkman- when the cascade of boos reached a crescendo, it literally drowned-out what I was listening to.
The public's mood did not improve when then-Dolphins first-year head coach Cam Cameron came out and addressed the public on why the organization had chosen to make that decision.
As always, to quote myself in my last sentence of my 2011 pre-NFL Draft post of April 28th, 2011, where I called on the Dolphins to draft Arkansas QB Ryan Mallette,
Just saying, that's NOT good news for long-suffering Dolphin fans.
Ever since the Super Bowl ended, surprisingly from my p.o.v. with a Giants win over the Patriots, I've had a Google Alert for 2012 NFL mock drafts. As you might imagine, though it started off with a trickle, for weeks it's been a veritable torrent, and I've looked at most of the citations.
Of all of these, though, as far as a Dolphins-related mock draft, the best I've seen thus far is the one done by the Palm Beach Post, and mostly Ben Volin and Brian Biggane, and not just because they agree with me on drafting Quinton Coples.
