Season unfolding perfectly for Dolphins: Winless but improving is ideal situation | Opinion

The Season Like No Other, the Great Tank of 2019, plows unstoppable toward the top of the 2020 NFL Draft.

The Miami Dolphins had a Perfect Season, once, a long, long time ago. This one has all the makings of being perfectly awful.

Miami was en route to losing at home Sunday to the Los Angeles Chargers, 30-10, when “Alumni Weekend” bisected the game, a halftime salute to the club’s great players from the (mostly) distant past. It is an aging constellation.

Hall of Famers Dan Marino and Bob Griese were out there for the pregame coin flip as Josh Rosen warmed up on the sidleine. At halftime the great Don Shula, nearing 90, was being pushed on and off the field in a wheelchair. It was another cruel reminder how good this franchise once was, juxtaposed with what it has become.

“Embarrassing,” one of the golden oldies I bumped into after the game said of this team and season.

Yes, that would summarize an 0-4 team that has now been outscored 163-26 — including an unfathomable 81-0 in the second half.

I’m not sure what first-year coach Brian Flores is telling his team at halftime, but the background music should be the theme song from the “Titanic.” Whatever you’re saying, Brian — try the opposite!

(Hey, Grandma always told us that sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.)

“We’ve go to make better second half adjustments,” said Flores on Sunday — not for the first time — just as Capt. John Edward Smith might have allowed he ought to have avoided that damned iceberg.

“You guys keep asking about the second-half thing,” said quarterback Josh Rosen to the media, bereft of any explanation.

OK,enough misery. Let’s try this. Let’s put on a miner’s helmet and go looking for positives. Start here: The Dolphins are showing progress, week by week or weak by weak as the case may be. It is mathematically certifiable. The losing margins, in order, have been 49 points, 43, 25 and now 20.

(At this rate, the Fins may finally win right around the time Thanksgiving is ceding to Christmas.)

More positives? Just like last week in Dallas, Miami had a decent first half on Sunday, verifying that somewhere within this team is the latent ability to not be putrid.

Rosen? He was (relatively speaking) magical early on. He started 7-for-7. Had a really nice 34-yard scoring pass to DeVante Parker. But, like the team, he cannot be good for a whole game. He finished a pedestrian 17-for-24 for 180 yards.

After a fourth-quarter interception he slumped to his haunches, helmet drooping.

“Just made a real dumb decision,” he admitted later.

Flores, off to a career head-coaching start that should be wished upon no man, looked more depressed after this game, more defeated, than I have seen him.

Some of this is on him (like those lack of halftime adjustments). But Flores knows what he cannot say aloud. That this is not about effort or execution or conditioning or any of that stuff. This is about a plain lack of talent — the direct result of Miami trading away most of its best players to accrue a bounty of first- and second-round draft picks in 2020 and ‘21.

With some luck, smart drafting and just the right franchise quarterback — such as Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa — there will be a payday for the misery of ‘19.

It is why plenty of Dolfans are all-in on the tanking. It also is why the stadium was one-third empty Sunday, far less than the 64,278 tickets distributed.

Because this is hard to watch.

Flores, to his credit, declines to play along with the notion that losing by “only” 20 points is progress.

“No, not good news,” he said Sunday when invited to take that path. We could have played a lot better. Eight, 10 plays — if you make ‘em, the game’s different. Do I see progress? Yeah, I do. But at the end of the day it’s about winning and losing. Were 0-4.”

At the same time, there is an argument this season — now at the quarter mark entering a bye week — is unfolding almost perfectly for what Miami needs of it.

The Dolphins need to be bad enough to secure the overall No. 1 draft pick or at least one very high. Good start on that one.

But the Dolphins also, ideally, need to be not so bad that they are clowned as a laughingstock and ridiculed nonstop as a locker room fractures. That seemed a risk after the first two losses. But Miami has palpably competed better last week and Sunday.

There is progress, even if the overarching umbrella of 0-4 makes one almost embarrassed to speak it aloud.

This story was originally published September 29, 2019 at 5:51 PM.