Cry, Eagles Cry. Dolphins hammer Philadelphia in second half, nab third win of year
DeVante Parker knows precisely what you thought of him.
“I was perceived as a bust,” Parker said Sunday, before turning to media. “Some of y’all, too. Things change now.”
Do they ever.
We can now say, without hesitation, that Parker is no bust. Rather, he is the Dolphins’ best offensive player, and that’s not even grading on a curve. He’s a legit star.
And after Sunday, when a national Fox audience got to watch the last 20 minutes or so of Miami’s thrilling, shocking 37-31 victory over the Eagles, he probably picked a few hundred fresh Pro Bowl votes, too.
Of all the weird and wild subplots to this strangest of Dolphins seasons, Parker’s emergence as a dynamic, dependable offensive threat might top the list.
Parker went absolutely off Sunday, making Eagles cornerback Ronald Darby look like a Pop Warner player. He had at least four leaping catches against the Eagles’ undersized defensive backfield. Parker set career highs with two touchdowns and 159 receiving yards. On the season, he’s already broken personal bests in receiving yards (854) and touchdowns (six).
More than anything, Parker’s doing what he set out to accomplish back in March, when he signed a contract extension with the team that drafted him in the first round: Change minds that were set in granite about his NFL career.
“My time being here, DeVante’s always been criticized,” Dolphins center Daniel Kilgore. “I think DeVante’s really had, since my time being here, he probably played his best game today.”
Added tight end Mike Gesicki: “He’s been playing great all year. I couldn’t be more happy for him because he’s taken a lot of criticism that he didn’t deserve in the past. He’s been making a ton of plays.”
If Parker can prove to be more than a one-year wonder — and most importantly, stay healthy — the Dolphins should have a good group of receivers in 2020, assuming Preston Williams makes a full recovery from a torn ACL.
As a result, they probably can use their three first-round picks on other positions, which is a good thing. They might need two, if not all three, of those picks to trade up for the quarterback they want.
Because with every Dolphins victory in this upside-down season, their odds of landing the draft’s top prospect shrinks.
Fun, tenacious and, remarkably often, inspired. The Dolphins are all of those things as they continue to play bigger than their size.
And they don’t give a damn, frankly, that it hurts their draft position.
The Dolphins put together their best all-around game of the season Sunday.
And they did so on a day when they had every incentive to lose. The Redskins and Bengals both won Sunday, meaning the Dolphins would have had no worse than the No. 2 pick in next year’s draft if they lost the remainder of their games.
Instead, they won, dropping them to fourth and in real danger of dropping even farther with the Jets, Giants and Bengals on the schedule in the next three weeks.
In other words, so long, Joe (Burrow). Any perhaps even ta ta, Tua (Tagovailoa).
But on Sunday, it was the Dolphins, not the Bengals, who played like the playoffs were on the line.
They rallied from a 14-point deficit and scored on six straight possessions, not including a kneel-down at the end of the first half.
Ryan Fitzpatrick put together another big performance. He threw for three touchdown passes and 365 yards, shaking off an interception on his first pass of the game.
But that’s only part of the reason Miami won. The Dolphins suspected they would struggle to win if they played the Eagles straight up, so they got creative.
Really creative.
As in, have your punter throw a touchdown pass to your kicker creative. Matt Haack and Jason Sanders did just that on fourth-and-goal from the 1, with Sanders taking the direct snap, faking a run and then shoveling the ball past the Eagles defense to Sanders.
What thought flashed through Fitzpatrick’s mind when he saw the formation, which had five Dolphins split far to the left and four to the right?
“Danny Crossman is crazy,” Fitzpatrick said, referring to the Dolphins’ special teams coordinator. “Like what is he dreaming up? This is the NFL. Like, that’s not – that doesn’t happen. And I saw – they worked on it multiple times, so we had seen it, but for it actually to be called in a game, I didn’t think it would ever be called in a game. But pretty cool – pretty cool that it worked.”
This story was originally published December 1, 2019 at 4:29 PM.
