Let them eat cake: A look at the Dolphins’ new Thursday ritual that rewards players
The moment, during an otherwise unremarkable team meeting, was rather surreal.
“Emmanuel Ogbah… Come on down!’” safeties coach Joe Kasper shouted, as Ogbah recalled it.
Awaiting Ogbah after his walk to the front of the room: a three-tiered wedding cake, his reward for an interception during the previous Sunday’s 70-20 dismantling of Denver.
“It was amazing going down there, having your brothers cheering for you,” Ogbah said. “I knew I was going to get one. I didn’t know it was going to be like this!”
For Dolphins players, making a particularly effective block, or forcing a fumble, or snagging an interception doesn’t merely elicit the self-satisfaction of a job well done. This year, it also sometimes earns a sweet treat.
Dolphins coaches this season have begun awarding cakes -- one to three a week -- to players who do something that gets the coaching staff’s attention from the previous week’s game, usually involving protecting or snatching the football.
“We were in the meeting a couple weeks ago,” rookie tight end Julian Hill said recently. “And I hear ‘Julian come down!’ What was cool was they had my face on the cake. The cake was humongous.”
Hill says he doesn’t even remember the play that earned him a cake, but running back Raheem Mostert — alert to everything going on around him — said it was for “his blocking abilities, protecting the ball, protecting the runner.”
Mostert received the first cake of the season, after an exemplary performance in the opener at the Chargers.
Allow Mostert to explain the cake protocol:
“When we have a ball meeting every Thursday, [coaches] talk about what we did to protect the ball and who stood out on tape protecting the ball on the offensive side. And on the defensive side, who got the ball out.”
Linebacker Jerome Baker said the Thursday “ball” meeting has value because “we go over who on that [upcoming opponent] that goes after the ball and is a target.”
Kasper typically announces who gets a cake, and the player walks to the front to retrieve it, like a game show contestant winning a prize. “It’s pretty funny,” Hill said.
But at Dolphins headquarters, all cakes are not created equal.
As Baker explains it, “if you get an interception as a defensive lineman, you get a wedding cake. If you score on defense, you get a wedding cake.”
Ogbah’s wedding cake — which could be cut into more than 20 slices — has been the most impressive to date, Mostert said.
But safety Jevon Holland created a challenge for Kasper when he forced three fumbles in the Denver game.
“Instead of Jevon getting three different cakes, they gave him a cookie cake,” Baker said. “And they’re all nice sized.”
Running back Chris Brooks got his cake for a block that Brooks didn’t even consider particularly impressive.
“It was the Giants game; I thought the block was all right,” he said before going on injured reserve recently. “I thought I could do better. I got a regular birthday cake, like the ones at Walmart.”
So do players gobble up the cakes themselves? “Most of them share it,” Baker said. “You will see them in the lunch room.”
Ogbah brought his cake home and invited over all the front seven Dolphins defenders for dinner and dessert.
But not even a group of NFL defensive linemen and linebackers could finish that cake on their own; Ogbah planned to take what was left of it back to team headquarters to share with the team’s video crew, but the cake slipped out of his hands and tumbled onto his garage floor as he was leaving his home.
“I cleaned it up pretty quickly,” he assured.
The rookie Hill isn’t sure what to do with his cake: “I got it in the freezer at home. Do I eat it and be fat? I’m trying to figure it out.”
Brooks said his cake is “still in the refrigerator here, free for whoever wants it. I don’t eat sweets that often.”
Ogbah smiles when discussing the Thursday ritual. “It’s cool,” he said. “Cool to do something different.”
This story was originally published October 31, 2023 at 2:51 PM.
