Dolphins deliver first failure of season — even before a football game is played | Opinion

No one is demanding or even asking a lot from the 2019 Miami Dolphins.

It’s not about competing for a championship. It’s not about catching the New England Patriots. It’s not even about improving on last season’s unremarkable 7-9 record. In fact, many Dolphins fans have made peace with something of a step back from 7-9.

Perhaps the main thing Dolphins fans are hoping for out of this season is that the team not to embarrass itself. And them.

Don’t be winless.

Don’t be riddled with dysfunction.

Don’t do dumb things.

Easy right? It’s asking the bare minimum. The Dolphins are being asked to spell “cat” and are being spotted a “C” and an “A.” And 99 percent of NFL teams would accept that assignment and offer up a “T.”

The Dolphins on Monday offered up some other letter in marking their first failure of the 2019 season. They did this by firing offensive line coach Pat Flaherty.

The team fired Flaherty all of five months after he was hired, after only two padded training camp practices, and weeks before the first preseason game.

And this feels like another instance in the ongoing history of the Dolphins failing to get out of their own way.

I cannot give you details why Flaherty was fired. I can tell you it wasn’t for off-field reasons, like the ones that led to the in-season ousters of offensive line coach Chris Foerster in 2017, offensive line assistant Chris Mosley in 2013 and the offseason firing of offensive line coach Jim Turner in 2014.

(By the way, if you’re wondering why the Miami offensive line hasn’t had any consistency for years, read the last sentence again for part of the answer.)

The Flaherty firing, a source said, was a football decision. So a football decision made without the benefit of, you know, any football games brought down the most experienced assistant on the Miami staff.

Coach Brian Flores, who made that football decision, said, “We felt we needed to make that move. I felt that way. I’m always going to do what’s in the best interest of the Miami Dolphins. ... It was a tough decision. It was. The easy decision would have been to do nothing and hope it gets better.”

Flores was short on details. He said there was “no one specific incident” causing the change. He simply said he believed Dave DeGuglielmo, who moves into the job after being hired as an analyst in the offseason, was “a better fit.”

Flores painted this as a move to help the Dolphins success. But to ignore the timing of this move is a failure is to look away from the truth.

About that failure:

Either Flaherty — who came to Miami with an resume that included coaching the New York Giants’ Super Bowl offensive lines in 2007 and 2011 — was not the coach Flores bargained for ... Or Flaherty is just as good as he has ever been during his 19-year NFL career and Flores failed to see it.

Either way, the failure is not just on one party. It’s on both. It’s on Flaherty for not being the guy Flores expected. It’s on Flores for hiring someone apparently so unworthy he didn’t merit making it to the season. It also would be on Flores if this move backfires.

Some folks will see this as Flores being smart enough to correct his mistake quickly. Flores said as much:

“It would have been easier to do nothing,” he repeated several times.

But that, ultimately, is spin because making a hiring so wrong it had to be undone before the season even arrived is the bigger problem. Why?

The Dolphins are the only NFL team trotting out a different offensive line coach for practice Tuesday. That does not prove them smarter than everyone else. Quite the opposite, actually.

So why is this mistake tangibly worrisome?

Well, the Dolphins’ offensive line has been troubled for years. Everyone knows this. It hasn’t enjoyed any continuity. It hasn’t shown consistent excellence. A unit that needs to play and perform with one heartbeat has been a confused mixture of sometimes good, often bad, for reasons no one’s been able to correct.

And if you thought it was going to be corrected this year, we now have to expect that it won’t after only four days of practice.

So if you thought Laremy Tunsil was going to take the next great leap in his development under a veteran line coach, that’s now in question. If you thought Chris Reed, a journeyman who played for Flaherty last year in Jacksonville, might be good enough to bridge the need for a starting left guard because of his familiarity with the coach, that’s gone, too.

Make no mistake, this change sets the Dolphins back in the short run.

Picking the right offensive line coach is one of a new coach’s most important tasks. Because the offensive line coach is perhaps the single most important coach on the offensive staff and that is doubly true for this Miami team.

Remember, you can have a genius offensive coordinator, but if your offensive line coach isn’t top draw, the plays might be cutting edge, but they’re rendered moot the moment the ball is snapped. Also, the Dolphins need good offensive line play to get a fair assessment of quarterback Josh Rosen.

All of that is in doubt now.

And, yes, it’s convenient DeGuglielmo was already on hand. But I’ve seen this movie before. He was the line coach under Tony Sparano in 2009-11. And he was the coach who took over after Foerster had his Tony Montana moment in his office in ‘17.

Googs is a solid fallback position. But the Dolphins had as many line issues with Googs as without Googs the past decade. So where’s that looming upgrade going to come from?

One final thought: Everyone hopes Miami’s 2019 coaching change and the influx of the so-called Patriot Way is going to mark a new way in the franchise’s direction. But this move is not the Patriots Way.

We know because on Monday while the Dolphins were raising new questions about their offensive line, the Patriots were restructuring the contract of outstanding right tackle Marcus Cannon.

One team adding uncertainty, the other solidifying and ensuring continuity.

This story was originally published July 30, 2019 at 12:29 AM.