Question that persists over Miami Dolphins coaching changes is how is the team better?
The newly refurbished Miami Dolphins coaching staff is at work this week after coach Brian Flores gave his holdover assistants a well-earned vacation the past couple of weeks and hired new guys to fill vacancies.
And after the team announces the new 2020 coaching staff there will be a lingering question that Flores may have a hard time answering: How is this staff better than last year’s staff?
The NFL offseason for all 32 teams is about improvement. Most teams, save the 2019 Miami Dolphins, spend the offseason trying to get better for the coming season.
Teams try to upgrade their roster. They study their playbooks and schemes to make improvements where possible. They also try to bring together the finest football coaches from all over the Earth to improve on the previous staff.
Improvement is the universal goal.
So, again, the question is how is this new Dolphins staff better?
That will be an interesting question for Flores because on its face, this staff doesn’t seem better.
It is certainly different because Flores has either fired or lost six coaches from the group of 20 he brought to Miami a year ago. It is definitely interesting because Flores hired an outside linebacker coach, quarterback coach and defensive backs coach who have never coached those positions in the NFL.
But better?
How?
I would tell you the hiring of Chan Gailey as the offensive coordinator is going to be a fun addition. Because Gailey is the rare combination of innovative and experienced -- a 68-year-old coach who will surprise with significant changes in his plan week to week.
But even this hire, which seems like the best of the bunch, comes with questions. Because Flores firing Chad O’Shea in favor of Gailey is on its face a setback to Josh Rosen. And it practically means Ryan Fitzpatrick will earn the starting quarterback job for the team again in 2020 if he’s around.
The reason is Fitzpatrick played under Gailey as the Buffalo Bills starter nearly a decade ago. And the two reunited at the New York Jets in 2015 and ‘16.
So Fitz knows Gailey and all of Gailey’s offense except the parts the coach authored the last three years while he was retired.
Fitzpatrick, who already had a huge edge over Rosen in experience versus different defenses last year, now adds another significant advantage in of having played in the new system for years.
Rosen, meanwhile, will be working under his fourth offensive coordinator in two NFL seasons.
So who do you think is going to earn that starting job?
You’re hoping it’s Tua Tagovailoa, who the Dolphins may select in the first round of the April draft, but my guess is Fitzpatrick would be able to beat him out as well, at least initially.
(By the way, notice I say earn the starting job and not win the starting job. Fitzpatrick will definitely earn it based on the reasons noted above. It’s the coaching staff’s decision whether he’ll actually win the job because they can easily hand it to someone else if they wish.)
So the lingering question is how is firing Chad O’Shea, last year’s offensive coordinator, in favor of Gailey, an upgrade for the team?
Same question applies to the new offensive line coach spot.
At this writing, I have no idea who will fill that spot. It is a closely guarded secret, assuming someone is already selected. The best candidate on the market, by the way, is former Redskins interim coach and Oakland Raiders head coach Bill Callahan.
[Update: Herald colleague Barry Jackson is reporting the Dolphins are hiring Steve Marshall to coach the offensive line and this brings a little sigh of relief in that he has experience. He’s coached for 40 years and his last NFL stop with with the New York Jets from 2015-17, with two of those years working with Gailey, who was then the team’s offensive coordinator. Not Callahan, but not fraught with question marks, either.]
Flores, starting his second season as Miami’s coach, already has an offensive line coach problem. He’s gone through two of them in one season. He fired one four days into training camp and didn’t retain the other after the season.
And the intriguing thing here is that the firing of Pat Flaherty last August looks like a mistake now. Flaherty, with 20 years of NFL experience, resisted the idea of entitling rookie guard Michael Deiter, the team’s third-round draft pick.
So he kept Deiter working with the reserves early in training camp. Except the Dolphins, and more specifically Flores, wanted Deiter in the starting lineup.
The ensuing disagreement played a role in Flores firing Flaherty.
But guess what? Deiter indeed was not ready then. And he proved throughout the season that he wasn’t necessarily ready then, either. In fact, the Dolphins benched Deiter late in the season before putting him back in.
The point is Flaherty was right. Deiter wasn’t ready.
Yet that helped get him fired.
And Flaherty’s replacement? Dave DeGuglielmo wasn’t necessarily fired. But Flores didn’t value him enough to give him a new contract, according to national reports.
So one of the most important assistant coach hires any head coach can make was a full-on miss by Flores in 2019.
No worries, because 2020 is a new year. But so far in 2020 the hires have been lacking in experience.
The club hired Robby Brown as the new quarterback coach rather than promoting Jerry Schuplinski, who did the job in 2019 when Jim Caldwell left the team to attend to a medical issue.
After doing the job for a year, Schuplinski was passed over for the promotion from assistant quarterback coach to quarterback coach. So he asked for an got his release to go be the QB coach for the New York Giants.
And now Brown, who worked with Gailey while he was an offensive assistant with the New York Jets, takes over coaching the QBs. Brown was a special assistant to the head coach and offensive analyst at West Virginia last year.
It’s obvious the Dolphins wanted a QB coach familiar with Gailey’s system to coach the QBs, regardless of his experience doing the job.
The other new hires? Defensive backs coach Kurt Kuntz has never coached in the NFL and comes to the Dolphins after spending the past eight years as the head coach at Struthers High in Ohio.
Outside linebacker coach Austin Clark is 29 and has never coached in the NFL. He comes from the University of Illinois, where he coached under former NFL coach Lovie Smith. Clark was the defensive line coach at Illinois so while coaching edge players is familiar to him, he is moving up in rank to the professional game and changing position group.
If you’re concerned the new defensive hires lack NFL experience doing their new jobs, join the club. And I present to you new defensive coordinator Josh Boyer.
Boyer spent 10 seasons (2009-2018) coaching the secondary in New England. He coached the secondary and was the pass defense coordinator for Miami last season.
Boyer has never been a defensive coordinator in the NFL but was the defensive coordinator at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 2005. The HardRockers (coincidentally) had a 1-9 record that year and gave up 30 points or more in seven of those losses.
All these unorthodox situations from the grizzled retired guy serving as offensive coordinator to the high school coach teaching in the secondary to the turnstile at the offensive line coach spot point directly at Flores.
And it raises questions.
The most important of those questions is how have these moves improved the Miami Dolphins?
This story was originally published January 15, 2020 at 11:29 AM.
