Mike McDaniel lands on a list head of the 2025 season that Dolphins fans hope he's not on next year — for one reason or another

With training camps set to open in a matter of weeks, all 32 teams and their personnel and fans head towards the 2025 season with hope for what lies ahead.

However, naturally, sometimes the seats on those rides into the season are a bit warmer for some coaches than others.  And for some, they're pretty hot.  

Count Miami Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel's seat to be among the hottest going into 2025, according to Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio, who put out his list of the top five coaches on the hot seat going into the season.  In fact, Florio has McDaniel as the hottest seat at #1. 

This is what Florio had to say about McDaniel: 

"Even at a time when everyone is 0-0 and all teams have plausible hope, it feels like the window has closed for a Dolphins team that could end up flying straight into the glass in 2025.

There’s dysfunction. There’s turmoil. There’s an unsettled situation with a star player who received a market-level contract in September 2024, and another star player who has said he wants out and who may feel the same way all over again if the 2025 season starts poorly.

It all comes back to Tua Tagovailoa. Can he play well? Can he stay healthy enough to play well?

Can the Dolphins win enough games to make it to the playoffs?

Along the way, can they shed the narrative (as confirmed by linebacker Jordyn Brooks) that they go soft as the weather turns cold?

Ultimately, it comes down to whether Stephen Ross will demand a major change if 2025 ends up being another disappointing season.

Thirty years ago, the late Jets owner Leon Hess fired Pete Carroll after one season by saying this, “I’m 80 years old. I want results now.”

Stephen Ross is five years older than Hess was when he said that."

Florio's logic is fair, and he should be spot on about this.  Ross also wasted absolutely no time saying - just hours after the season-ending loss to the Jets back in January -that the duo would be retained but that keeping them isn't a sign that the status quo would be acceptable moving forward. 

However, one has to wonder if there's still more leash that Ross is willing to give McDaniel and general manager Chris Grier here, particularly if they simply make it back to the playoffs.  Ross put no public pressure on his top duo until January, who have seen the Dolphins get close to a breakthrough in 2023 but again fall short of a playoff win in a 26-7 loss to Kansas City after a massive late-season collapse. 

That said, another losing season should - in a world of actual accountability (something Grier hasn't been living in much over the last decade) - spell the end of the time for both McDaniel and Grier in South Florida.  

As such, 2026 likely should be a time for Dolphins fans to have something to look forward to - either building off a playoff win with their current regime, or starting over with optimism that a new regime will end a quarter century of playoff futility.