The Dolphins Coaching Glow Up…….No Caps

The Dolphins Coaching Glow Up…….No Caps

I’m an audio person at heart. I was brought up listening to the wireless in a household where news, radio plays, sport, and music all came to me via that medium. As an adult, I spent nearly a quarter of a century working for BBC Radio, and even today, there are radios dotted around my house. Sure, I watch a lot of television. But there’s something special about painting pictures with words that no TV set will ever capture.

The radio was also where I had my first connection to football, spending hours as a teenager on Saturday and Sunday nights listening to college games and the NFL on Armed Forces Radio.

So today it pains me that neither of my children – I have a daughter who’s 21 and a son who’ll be 19 later this month – has any understanding of how to switch a radio on, let alone navigate the frequencies to find a particular station. Even in the car, they’ll spring straight for the Spotify app rather than attempt to make sense of Medium Wave or DAB to find a window to a different sphere.

But I accept that’s the world we live in. Every generation falls for something different, yet even though you accept and understand this, as the elder in the room, you’re still occasionally left wondering why things feel so different now. Of course, I’m sure my parents and my parents’ parents felt exactly the same as I do now as they stood on the brink of enormous societal changes. And I get it. There’s very much a sense of ‘old man barking at clouds’ in what I say.

But it doesn’t stop me from feeling like Carl, the old man in Up. And every young person is Russell, wilderness adventurer. I can’t even describe a player as 6’7 these days without it becoming a thing.

However, I digress. Because herein lies a lesson about your 2026 Miami Dolphins and the staff that’s being constructed by new head coach Jeff Hafley.

The needs of the modern player are changing. The ecosystem that today’s players operate in isn’t remotely the same as the one that Bob Griese won a Super Bowl in, or that Dan Marino set records in. It’s not even the same as the one Jay Fiedler or even Ryan Tannehill competed in.

Modern life as we know it is charging on relentlessly. Trends change weekly in front of our eyes. Everyone’s life is social, whether they like it or not. We all have a platform for our voice, no matter what we have to say. Concentration spans are at an all-time low – have you tried reading a book and not picking up your phone recently? Today’s young men and women even speak a new language for real.

Me? I just wish people would touch grass more often.

But there is a serious side to all this. With the announcement last night that the Dolphins are hiring Darius Eubanks from Georgia Tech, it made the eighth new coach brought to South Florida with overwhelming collegiate experience, and that’s very important because this absolutely and unequivocally isn’t a coincidence.

It’s a definite plan by Hafley and Jon-Eric Sullivan as part of their clearly coordinated youth movement.

This is a Dolphins team bereft of star power and its future success is predicated on players currently in college, and frankly, still in high school. Having coaches who understand the world they move in, who’re aware of what these young men like and don’t like, and who’re completely in tune with the Circadian rhythms of the modern athlete is extremely important. In 2026, successful coaching is as much about connections as it is the teaching of techniques.

When you’ve spent much of your career working with 18-22 year olds and grasping their lifestyles, languages, and challenges, that means something in today’s NFL, and it’s just as important as any experience or lack thereof in the professional game.

If you can understand why a meeting shouldn’t last longer than ten minutes, or why a player has three phones, or why Autry and Y3 are so important to the gameday fit, then as a coach you’re winning. Every single person reading this who’s played a sport has played harder and better for a coach they’ve connected with.

That’s just a fact, and for Hafley, who’s spent 16 of his 24 coaching years in college, it’s a really smart play. If you’re a 22-year old rookie with girlfriend problems, are you going to be able to turn to a coach in his 60’s who’s as old as his grandfather? Or his 31-year old position coach who was his best friend’s coach at Clemson or Florida State or UCLA and who ‘gets it’?

Eubanks, who’ll be the assistant special teams coach, is just 34 and was a player in Cleveland in 2015 when Hafley was on the Browns staff. Since 2017 he’s worked at Arkansas, Samford, Georgia State, Liberty, Georgia Southern and Georgia Tech.

He joins 46-year old Ladell Betts who takes over as running backs coach and spent most of his career in high school and at Iowa; 42-year old Zach Yenser who spent 13 of his 17 coaching years in college at Kansas, SMU and Kentucky is now the offensive line coach, taking over from Butch Barry; 42-year old Matt Applebaum returns to South Florida as Applebaum’s assistant having spent his career at Miami, Bucknell, South East Louisiana, Davidson, Towson and two stops at Boston College; 32-year old Sean Duggan is the new defensive coordinator and his career has seen stops at Hawaii, UMass, Ohio State and Boston College before following Hafley to the Packers; new cornerbacks coach Jahmile Addae has spent his career at West Virginia, Michigan, Cincinnati, Arizona, Minnesota, Georgia and Miami before the 41-year old coached last year with the Buffalo Bills; Al Washington was plucked from South Bend where he was Marcus Freeman’s LB’s coach, a role he’ll continue in Miami. But the 41-year-old had stints at BC, Cincinnati, Michigan, and Ohio State before that, and 34-year-old Chuka Ndulue, the new assistant DL coach, whose coaching career prior to last season with the LA Chargers was spent at Oklahoma, Nebraska, Southern Illinois, New Mexico State, and Colorado State.

The average age of these eight new coaches is just 39 years old, and between them, they have 93 seasons of college coaching experience versus just 15 in the NFL.

There is a clear-cut draft-and-develop mindset in Miami under Jeff Hafley, with young men coaching up young men and building connections with them that might be a key factor in squeezing an extra 2% from someone in the cold in Buffalo, down three in a Wildcard game. The new coach and GM understand what makes young players tick in 2026, and they’re piecing together a staff accordingly.

That, ladies and gentlemen…….that’s bussin’.