MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — If you expected Mike McDaniel to name names after another embarrassing Miami Dolphins loss, you left his Tuesday news conference disappointed.
But your expectations were not consistent with reality, based on McDaniel’s DNA. But just because he doesn’t want to call out individual players publicly doesn’t mean he hasn’t — and won’t continue to do so — behind closed doors.
Mike McDaniel Owns Up to Miami Dolphins’ Failures
We wrote late Monday that McDaniel needs to be more caustic with his team about their failures, and our sense is that this week will have a different tone from the famously upbeat Dolphins coach.
“I think the answers aren’t somewhere in a different orbit,” McDaniel told reporters. “The answers are in-house, in terms of there’s some very concrete direct conversations that need to be had, and I think it’s fair for me to want to keep those in-house considering just the way I don’t believe the press conferences and the media is where to air out your dirty laundry.
“… [But] you don’t absolve yourself of responsibility in the least. You really force yourself to have a hard look at everything you’re doing and then once you assess that — and the team wants to know while they’re playing, they just know the results aren’t there.
“They’re responsible for their jobs, but the team wants to know where our failures are coming from, so you have to get ready for the conversations that may be hard in the moment, but you owe it to the football team and to everyone involved to be very, very direct — because the bottom line is we have things that we are preparing and have reasons by way of what’s in front of us by the practice tape. We feel certain ways going into a game, and then we’re not getting those results through execution.
“I think it’s not as easy as, ‘Do something different,’ but you do have to do some things different because clearly there’s a gap in preparation and game-day execution. So no shorthand way to do that. You have to diligently look at each and every responsibility and what you’re doing well, what you’re not doing well, and hit it right between the eyes.”
Much has been made since the team’s three-score loss to the Tennessee Titans about how the Dolphins’ offense doesn’t function without Tua Tagovailoa on the field, and that’s certainly true.
But it can’t be a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card for McDaniel. His contemporaries are winning with backups, and the expectation is McDaniel figures out a way too, starting Sunday in New England.
McDaniel announced Tuesday that Snoop Huntley will again start for the Dolphins in Week 5.
“It just feels like an offense that’s not good enough generally and whether that’s coaching or playing, we’re all in it together,” McDaniel said. “It’s a bottom-line business. I think there’s strengths and weaknesses that everybody provides, but realistically from my history within the offense my entire coaching career, there’s tools and mechanisms that allow it to adjust. Really, half the time you could say the plays don’t matter — what I call — until we have 11 people executing something in one direction.
“I think there’s perfectly capable players to do the things that we’re asking them to do going into the game. We all feel good about it. We’re not getting that on game day, so I wouldn’t say that it’s not tailored to; when you have injuries, when you have adjustments in the lineup, people have to step up, and if they’re executing their jobs at 90% generally, it needs to be 95[%] to 98[%], and we’re not getting that right now.
“So bottom line is that it’s definitely not one person, and there’s a lot of things that are going on in the pass game that have to do with line of scrimmage. A lot of things on the line of scrimmage that have to do with the receivers and the eligibles getting open in the timing of the play, so collectively we just need to do a much better job.”