Dolphins coaching staff takes blame for defensive problems with little explanation | Opinion
If you want a deep, detailed explanation why the Miami Dolphins’ coaching staff has made the decisions it has this young season, well, forget it.
Other than the confession that they need to do a better job to raise the team from its current 0-2 depths, there’s not going to be a lot of expounding about why stuff isn’t working.
Take, for example, Monday when coach Brian Flores and defensive coordinator Josh Boyer spoke about the team’s strategy of putting rookie cornerback Noah Igbinoghene in a position to be overmatched against veteran Buffalo receiver Stefon Diggs.
“Look, to me we just have to cover guys that we’re on,” Flores said. “We had issues with Stefon Diggs, we had issues with [John] Brown, we had issues with [Cole] Beasley.
“My message to the guys is the guys we put you on, those are the guys we expect you to cover — whether that’s Noah on Diggs, or Byron Jones on Diggs, or (Xavien Howard) on Brown or Nik Needham on Beasley. We all just have to do a better job of covering. We felt that was the best matchup, so that’s why we did that.”
This kind of makes my brain hurt because that cannot be it. Flores and his coaches are intelligent, tactical thinkers. They have won Super Bowl rings, for goodness sake.
So it cannot simply be about putting a guy on a guy and expecting the best to happen.
There has to be underlying reasons why the Dolphins didn’t move Howard, Miami’s best cornerback left in the game, to cover Buffalo’s best receiver once Jones left the game after four plays with a groin injury.
So I’m wondering if the reason Howard was not moved onto Diggs is because the Dolphins don’t believe Howard is 100 percent healthy or fully himself yet. After all, he did have a knee surgery last year. And he did miss much of training camp while dealing with a rehabilitation from that surgery. And he also took time recovering from being on the Covid-19 reserve list.
“I would say he’s healthy,” Flores said. “We wouldn’t put him out there if we didn’t think he was healthy. Obviously we had injuries yesterday as you guys saw. But he was on Brown and he’s healthy.”
It’s good Howard is healthy. And it’s also kind of bad.
Because that means the coaching staff is out of excuses for not moving Howard over to Diggs. And let me be clear so everyone understands:
The mistake did not come in planning to have Igbinoghene on Diggs if Jones got injured. That decision, thoughtfully made during the game plan stage of last week’s preparation, seems a perfectly acceptable answer to an uncomfortable injury circumstance.
Boyer explained that initial decision was made taking into account how much Buffalo moves certain receivers, what routes those receivers run best and the type of receivers those guys are.
The problem came when Diggs almost immediately began to light up Igbinoghene and the coaching staff changed nothing significant to get a different result.
The Dolphins play a Cover 1 base defense, which means all but one of their defensive backs are in man-to-man coverage against receivers downfield. Only one safety has the ability to roam free in coverage to help his mates.
But as Diggs continually beat Igbinoghene, Miami coaches didn’t switch up or often give the rookie some help by adjusting from their scheme to more often double Diggs. And, obviously, coaches kept their best remaining cornerback, Howard, away from Buffalo’s best receiver while his rookie teammate struggled.
“Well, again, like I said, the factors that go into that, and obviously like I said we can coach it better for sure,” Boyer said. “We don’t always have to be in the same calls and we can help the players that way, too. But, again, fundamentally there’s some things that we did that we can do better — from coaching, put them in a better position, and from a player standpoint, just executing.
“I mean, there were a lot of routes that I would say they hit us on that were similar routes that, one, we can do a better job adjusting as coaches, and that’s on me. That’s not on anybody else, that’s on me. And, I would say there’s some things fundamentally we can do from an execution standpoint that will help us from a player aspect, too.”
I’m not sure I understand all this. All I know is the Dolphins were at sea on Sunday and neither the head coach nor defensive coordinator changed the ship’s course when there was a giant hole in the ocean threatening to swallow them up.
We have seen this in two consecutive games now.
In the season opener against New England, the Patriots showed the Dolphins’ staff quite early and often their intent to run the ball using quarterback Cameron Newton as their point man for a read-option attack.
And the Dolphins were not able to adjust successfully in game. Either players didn’t understand the corrections, or they weren’t communicated well. And the team was not prepared for New England’s strategy before the game, either.
The corrections to those problems were reportedly made last week, after the first game, once it was too late to affect the previous loss. That, by the way, was just in time to watch Buffalo offensive coordinator Brian Daboll do something completely different.
Daboll utilized what looked like an elite passing game against the Dolphins and Miami had no answer.
Give Flores credit, he’s taking responsibility for the issues.
“We as a coaching staff have to do a better job of putting guys in position to make plays,” he repeated Monday after saying as much Sunday.
And part of that now is getting some pass rush pressure from the Miami defensive front that it has not generated enough of the past two weeks.
“I think we have to do a better job as a coaching staff of putting them in position to rush better and then the players have to work their techniques, their fundamentals, to rush better,” Flores said. “So, again, there’s a lot of things we have to work on and that’s certainly at the top of the list.”
One more gripe (yeah, I’m a little grumpy today): This Dolphins coaching staff is new. It is generally NFL inexperienced on the defensive side. There are a lot of young, talented coaches on that defensive staff. But their youth is showing in a season in which they haven’t gained enough early knowledge of what their players are capable of doing.
In other words, this defensive coaching staff is learning the roster kind of on the run. They’re figuring out what guys do well and don’t do well as they see it in games. Maybe that’s the reason they put so much trust on a rookie to cover a former Pro Bowl receiver while keeping their own former Pro Bowl cornerback away from the assignment.
“We’re still refining who does what best,” Flores said.
Taking time to do that was acceptable last year when no one had any expectations of the Dolphins competing. That was acceptable as last year’s team got off to a 0-7 start.
That’s not OK this year. This year the expectation is for this coaching staff to know the team they put together. And then to successfully adjust to problems next series rather than next week.
This story was originally published September 21, 2020 at 1:14 PM.
