Mailbag: What’s next for Dolphins after being eliminated from playoff contention?
Reality quickly set in for the Dolphins Sunday, as they saw their seven-game winning streak come to an end and then their postseason chances eliminated with a series of unfavorable outcomes in AFC games. It leaves the team without another postseason appearance and questions about the future of many people with one game left in the regular season.
In this week’s mailbag, I take a look at the entirety of the Dolphins’ season, where Tua Tagovailoa stands in the organization and more. And a reminder that if you have questions you would like me to answer in future mailbags, you can ask me on Twitter or email me.
Here we go:
While there is still one more game in the season, most preseason predictors (ESPN, Bleacher, and others) had this Dolphins team as 8 or 9 win team. If so, (outside of the rollercoaster streaks) how truly disappointed should we be about this season? - @elijts
The season began with a lot of optimism, and rightfully so. But you make a good point; entering the season, the Dolphins’ over/under for wins was 9.5. While they’ll technically fall short of that mark, this year always felt like a steppingstone season with Tagovailoa as the full-time starter as opposed to a contending season. The team could have not matched last year’s 10-win total and I thought there could have still been much to gain if Tagovailoa had made legitimate improvements. The question for Dolphins’ decision-makers now is whether they saw enough from Tagovailoa to dissuade them from pursuing other options at quarterback and continuing to build around him.
Are we moving on from Tua? - @nickdagreat11
It’s an obvious question for fans after a really bad outing that became ammunition for the most ardent Tagovailoa skeptics. I’ll say this: if the Dolphins decide to go another way at quarterback in the offseason, it won’t be because of this one bad game. It’s already well-known that the team was interested in Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson and pursued a trade for him in the first half of the season. I think Tagovailoa has made improvements and probably does deserve another season of the team building a legitimate offensive line, but for all we know, the decision-makers’ minds could already be made up.
Is the lack of talent picked in the draft, with the exception of Waddle and Holland, holding the coaching staff back? They seem to start slow and improve throughout the year until they are overpowered with superior talent at the end of the season. - @Dquarajr
On defense, I don’t see the issue to be talent. Earlier in the season, it may have been about getting younger guys up to speed and putting players in the best position to succeed. But when the unit was at its best during the win streak, you saw how dominating that group could be.
The offense, on the other hand, is a different story. I can’t say the unit’s struggles are tied to a lack of trying to acquire talent. The building of the offensive line has been a failure, to date, with multiple early-round draft picks who haven’t developed at the rate we’ve expected. Waddle was a hit in the draft and if Will Fuller doesn’t have a mysterious finger injury that sidelines him for the majority of the year, I think we’re looking at a really formidable receiving corps with him, Waddle, DeVante Parker and Mike Gesicki. Unfortunately, that’s not how things panned out. The one position that we all know they need to address with more intensity is running back. It says a lot that two of the top running backs at the end of the season — Duke Johnson and Phillip Lindsay — were mid-season pickups. With over $70 million in projected cap space this offseason, the Dolphins clearly need to devote most of their attention to putting together an offense that can take pressure off the defense and keep up with the league’s most explosive teams.
Do you think Grier/Flores will take a new approach to [offensive line] (like spending for top talent available in free agency)? - @LaikaSpaceDog
I do think that, with the most projected cap space in the NFL, we’ll see the team target some of the top offensive linemen in free agency. But I also don’t think that they’ll completely abandon using top draft capital to draft linemen. The organization still has a clear approach to building their team in which they want to draft and develop players. It hasn’t been a roaring success on the offensive line, but I don’t see them giving up on all these young players that they’ve invested a lot into.
