Dolphins’ Wilson takes pay cut. And Dolphins legends share behind-the-scenes Shula stories
Wide receiver Albert Wilson, who had been in danger of being released because of a $9.5 million salary this season, instead agreed to a take a pay cut to $3 million (of which $1 million is guaranteed) with another $1 million in incentives, a league source confirmed.
Wilson’s restructuring leaves the Dolphins with $29 million in cap space before signing any of their 11 draft picks or a practice squad. Those two costs will leave Miami with about $14 million in space - which can be carried over to next season or used to bolster a position where the team sustains an injury or believes it needs augmentation.
Wilson, who is entering the final season of his contract, missed three games last season because of a hamstring injury and spent the early part of the year working back from the previous season’s hip injury. He started four games and played well late in the season, finishing with 43 receptions for 351 yards and one touchdown.
Wilson, 27, originally signed a three-year, $24 million deal with Miami in 2018 free agency. He already has made all the guaranteed money in the deal ($14.45 million).
Wilson, Allen Hurns and Jakeem Grant are all options to be Miami’s primary slot receiver this season.
SHULA REACTION
More anecdotes and thoughts from Dolphins greats about iconic coach Don Shula, as the reaction keeps pouring in following his passing Monday at age 90:
▪ Hall of Famer running back Larry Csonka didn’t expect the news of Shula’s death to make him quite as emotional as it did.
“I thought I could handle someone telling me that Coach had passed. I was out cutting brush in a field, and my wife Audrey called me and said Coach had passed. I never really knew until that moment how close that rascal had really got to me, until he was gone.
“Unfortunately through the course of my life, losing parents and different loved ones, you realize after they’re gone, how much more they meant to you than what you realized when they were here. I hope I can be better at that in the future because I felt a terrible loss. I felt like someone very close to me and my family had passed.
“Coach Shula was such a rock. He was so exact in his feelings, so totally 100 percent, ‘this is the way it is.’ You drew off that strength when you were around him without even realizing it. More often than not, I resented him for it. I muttered with the rest of the players. ‘This is too much, too long, too hot, too everything,’ but the result was perfection. One time. One time in the course of 100 years, one team made every play it had to make during the course of a season to attain perfection.”
▪ Csonka cited Shula’s comments after the loss to the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl 6, following the 1971 season, as a signature moment. The Dolphins went undefeated the following season.
“After that game, we were all in the locker room and he threw everyone else out but the coaches and the players, and he said, ‘This moment is a moment we’re going to learn from. You’ve got to remember how you feel right now after just getting your ass kicked in the Super Bowl. You’ve got to remember that because next year, we’re going to open up. In five or six months, we’re going to get together back at camp and we’re going to open up, and we are going to re-dedicate ourselves every week to the task at hand – not look forward to the playoffs or look forward to a winning season or look forward to any of that. We’re going to concentrate one week at a time, one game at a time and we’re going to go every game with the intent of winning every game.’
“He said that moments after losing a Super Bowl. He dictated what was going to happen the next year with an undefeated season, and I think that was the pinnacle of his career. If there was one point that he would pull out to judge the entire career by, that would be the high point – that undefeated season. Because what happened was the very essence of what he had alluded to.”
▪ In my Shula piece on Monday, Manny Fernandez told the story of putting an alligator in Shula’s shower. Csonka filled in more details on that:
“Well, Manny Fernandez and I decided to go fishing the day after a game – an exhibition game. We went out and Manny Fernandez, while we were fishing… said, ‘Csonk, there’s a gator over on the shore with babies,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t want any part of it.’
“And he said, ‘You know, I can catch one of those,’ and I said, ‘Manny, I don’t think you can catch a baby alligator. You’re going to lose fingers or a leg or the mama’s going to get you. That’s going to be a bad situation.’ He said, ‘No, I’m telling you. I could do it.’ And with that, Manny jumped over out of the boat, went up on the bank, went into the bushes – it was like something in a movie. There was tumbling and screaming and growling and pretty soon Manny Fernandez came walking out of the bushes with a baby alligator about, I don’t know, two-and-a-half, three feet long.
“Manny walked over, threw it in the boat and I jumped out of the boat. To make a long story short, we took it back to camp. We were going to put it in the pond out front. On the way back to camp, we got the idea that we thought it’d be pretty funny to put it in Shula’s shower. He had a separate shower than the team, devoted to coaches, of course. We thought that would be kind of humorous so we took a vote.
“Coach Shula won by one vote that we would tape the Gator’s mouth shut just in case it got ahold of him in the shower. We didn’t want to lose him entirely. So we taped its nose shut and put it in the shower, and he came out and saw it and came into the locker room and was raising Cain and headed straight for me, but I saw him coming so I jumped out the side door and Jim Kiick took the brunt of the abuse for the alligator in the shower.
“But the good thing about Shula – the great thing about Shula – was his intensity with anything connected with football, but on a thing like the alligator, he had a great sense of humor and he had a good laugh about it. So it was kind of a pressure relief.”
▪ Former All Pro linebacker John Offerdahl recalled the circumstances that led him to ask Shula not to curse at him.
“Coach Shula demanded so much from us and there was a game in Cleveland. That was his home state. We were in a Monday Night Football game my rookie year. I was playing hurt all of the time and I had got through the whole game and right before the end, went to the X-ray room, got diagnosed and just had a terrible contusion on my arm. After the game, after our defeat, I went back to Coach Shula with the doctor and he just was so frustrated. He took out a little bit of that frustration on me, and coming from Wisconsin, I didn’t swear.
“I heard a lot of it in sports, and Coach Shula had a little bit of frustration in him that day and shared it with me. It bothered me. It not only motivated you, but it would also challenge you. Later on that week, Bob Baumhower was my locker mate and he would encourage me to just chill out, but I had to get it off my chest, and I went into Coach Shula’s office that week and shared with him that I never wanted to be sworn at again. The story goes beyond that, but needless to say, Coach Shula respected my wishes. He certainly had ways of communicating with you. It didn’t have to be in the form of a swear word. He would definitely rile you up and get you prepared.”
▪ Offerdahl, on one of Shula’s greatest legacies: “He demanded the most out of his players and many of his players couldn’t deal with that, including myself at times. But what happened is that we performed beyond our wildest imagination.
“When a player can look in the mirror and say that wasn’t me, but someone else’s expectation of my performance that overcame my own limitations, that is an amazing aspect of a great coach. It’s not easy in the moment, but in retrospect, every player that played for Coach Shula looks back and says he got me to do more out of my body, out of my performance, than I could have ever done on my own. A mentor, a coach, a great leader can take a team of people like that and make them great. That’s what he did year in and year out for those years he coached for the Miami Dolphins.”
▪ Former Dolphins receiver Nat Moore, now the team’s senior vice president of special projects and alumni relations, shared this story:
“I had a pinched nerve in my neck and pretty soon I ended up starting to wear a neck brace; but I remember a game where we had to have that victory and I land on my shoulder and I’m in such pain. I make the catch, I come off to the sideline and he looks at me like, ‘And where are you going?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m in so much pain.’ I can’t believe what he’s saying to me. I just got the first down. I got hit and my shoulder hurt, and the pain subsides. I go back in the ball game and once again we need a third down. I make the play and I come off and I am in so much pain, I don’t know what to do; and he is riding me. He is ripping me.
“Long story short, the game ends, we win. The first guy to come to my locker and pat me on the back and tell me what a great job I did and way to hang in there, he knew it was tough, he knew I could do it, was Don Shula. I always think about things like that where he didn’t allow players to quit on themselves or the team. He always found a way to motivate you to give a little bit more than you thought you had, to become a little bit better player than you thought you could be; and I think that was his key to success.”
▪ Hall of Fame quarterback Bob Griese: “I lost a great friend. We spent a lot of time together at lunch, and his favorite place to have lunch was at Gulfstream Park. We were at Gulfstream maybe a month and a half ago for one of our lunches. That’s probably the last time I saw him.
“He was amazing. We’d sit right outside in public and people would be going by and some lady with her granddaughter would stop by and say ‘You’re coach Shula!’ He would smile and sign an autograph, and then she said, ‘Can I take a picture?’
“And he’d say ‘Yeah, with your granddaughter. So she would take the picture, and then he’d say, ‘Now take one with me by yourself.’ And then other people would come by. He was at the end of the table and that’s where he wanted to be, where he could meet and greet and say hello. He was a social person. Back then maybe he wasn’t, but now he was.”
▪ All-Pro left tackle Richmond Webb remembered “weigh-in day” under Shula.
“You did not want to be overweight because not only would he announce your name, but he would announce how many pounds you were actually overweight. I think it just put pressure on you that you wanted to make your weight because you didn’t want your name called out in that meeting, because not only did Coach Shula know, but everybody on the team knew who was overweight or whatever.
“Even though some guys struggled – because I was one of them sometimes. I could get in the hot tub to try to lose a pound or two to get it, because you wanted to do whatever possible to not have your name called out at those meetings.”
This story was originally published May 5, 2020 at 9:24 AM.
