A Requiem For a Head Coach

THE BEGINNING:
The love affair begins aboard a Gulfstream G650ER. Mike McDaniel, the newly anointed saviour of one of the NFL’s most storied franchises, bereft of glory for two decades, is dressed in a dark blue suit with a chequered tie and pocket-square. The camera pans to him as he looks out of the window. His hair is slick, and his beard well-kept. In his right ear – the only one we can see – sits an Apple AirPod.

McDaniel suddenly turns and looks down the plane, tilting his head to the side as if watching something intently, and says to no one in particular:

“I mean, check your pulse if you’re not fired up.”

It’s February 7th, 2022.

Less than four years later, as yet another wasted season comes to a shuddering halt, he stands at the podium in front of the South Florida media and tells reporters that today is a “great day.” The Miami Herald’s Barry Jackson asks him why, and McDaniel, with that same thousand-yard stare he had aboard Steve Ross’s plane, says simply:

“Because we’re another day closer to death.”

Two statements. Each was a microcosm of McDaniel’s tenure, one that veered from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again.

Often in the same game.

Occasionally on the same drive.

In the end, although the jokes and the childlike humour began to wear, they only did so because the results were so poor, the promise of what might have been fading in a colander of reasons ranging from bad culture to uneven quarterback play, poor drafts, and an inability to win a game of consequence. If you look up ‘mediocrity’ in the dictionary, you’ll see his record: 35-33. Yet if football was simply about playing teams under .500, then the Haggar Clothing Co, which makes the gold jackets for the Hall of Fame, would almost certainly be getting a call from Louis Vuitton to tell them to step aside, as they, the Parisienne fashion house, would be measuring up for Mike McDaniel.

Alas, football doesn’t work that way. The Dolphins were 4-17 under the Yale grad against teams that entered with a winning record, fourth worst in the NFL since 2022. Against teams at or below .500, he was 31-16.

Slayer of the Mediocre.

Worse still, the inability to win in the cold or on the road should have made the decision to fire him easier than it was. Not because of the defeats per se. More of the same mistakes, the same issues, and the same reasons why Miami was losing big games in his first season were happening in his 4th. Even in his final game as head coach, his inability to call salient plays to convert on 3rd and 4th and short were, remarkably, still there.

Yet it had all started so well: the Dolphins began 2022 as one of the hottest teams in football, coming from behind – albeit playing with house money down 35-14 – on the road in Baltimore before taking down the Bills at home to go 3-0. But when Tua Tagovailoa suffered a concussion on a week four Thursday night in Cincinnati, it was the first pressure point for a coach who was taken the league and the meme creators by storm.

The Dolphins fell to 3-3 but bounced back emphatically, winning five in a row, and flew to San Francisco as the hottest team in football. McDaniel, taking on his best friend and former peer Kyle Shanahan, had a chance in the late window to show everyone what his team and his scheme were made of. On top of that, a win would give Miami the best record in the league with five games to play, three of which were at home.

Statement time.

The editorials that followed his firing last week all tried to find a high point in his tenure. Some pointed to the field goal that beat Dallas to make the playoffs, or the 70 points against Denver. I will argue vehemently that the first eleven seconds of that game were McDaniel’s Everest. A 75-yard touchdown to Trent Sherfield on the first play of the game, a symphony of movement so beautifully designed that it pulled All Pros like Nick Bosa, Fred Warner, and Talanoa Hufanga so far out of their respective positions that Sherfield was able to run 65 yards untouched to pay dirt. Reverse jet motion, switch release from a two-back set with a play-action, and a classic inside the hashes pass when everyone was expecting the ball to be thrown to All Everything wideout Tyreek Hill, whom Tagovailoa, now recovered from his ordeal in Cincinnati, was staring at.

It was classic McDaniel. More cheese than Edam, sexier than a Dita Von Teese burlesque show, a moment to put the entire league on notice: This wasn’t your daddy’s Miami Dolphins. This Best Buy salesman-lookalike of a head coach was doing things differently.

Maybe, after decades of pain, things were going to change.

In the words of the man whose team was sat atop the NFL with 59 minutes and forty-nine seconds left at Levi Stadium…….check your pulse if you’re not fired up.

***
THE MIDDLE:
It’s just under a year later, and I’m sitting inside a room at Frankfurt’s PSD Bank Arena, about 20 minutes north of the city centre, waiting for Mike McDaniel to arrive. In front of me are a hardcore of Miami beat reporters, including David Furones, Joe Schad, and Marcel Louis-Jacques. Perched in the corner behind an old MacBook is the great Peter King. At the front of the room is a dark blue curtain and a green retractable banner adorned with small Dolphin logos. A long white podium that contains a thin microphone and two bottles of water has been placed in front of the banner. There’s a drinks machine stage left, and the vibe is very much school canteen.

Miami’s head coach comes in and makes a joke about speaking German before he starts to take questions. About 15 minutes in I ask him a double header about the evolution of his offense, about how in 2022 he was running what was essentially a Kamikaze style RPO game with Tua making first level reads and pushing the ball down the field on rail wheel and post wheel routes. But how in 2023 he’s changed the scheme so significantly and so quickly: everything is now more condensed, between the numbers, with differing route depths and Tua turning his back off of play action. So, I ask, is that down to the evolution of his quarterback, or his own evolution as a play designer and play caller? And is he working on the next iteration of the scheme to stay one step ahead?

“You know I don’t, on principle I don’t look at is as my scheme at all,” says McDaniel. “Furthest thing from it. We’re taking elements of what people do well and trying to lean into that. The evolution is really centred around what your players are good at and evolving in that direction. Quite literally, the scheme is the result of the players. So in terms of forecasting as a schematic guru, I see it far from that. The product looks good because people know what they’re doing and are fully invested in it. Yeah, there’s some movement and the like, but the orchestration only works……”

He pauses for breath before beginning again, his mind suddenly distracting him.

“You know how much deliberate practise it takes to time up motions with concepts and have footwork with the quarterback, time up with the footwork of the wide receiver, and the aiming points of each combo block, tied to the runner? All of those things… from our offensive staff standpoint, we’re just opening our eyes and watching our players and adapting to them. That’s how I’ve always looked at any it.”

The press conference ends, and I chat to King and to Louis-Jacques before heading downstairs to the field to watch the open portion of practice. McDaniel walks out onto the field and yucks it up with some of his players before standing and watching his quarterbacks throw.