Kelly: Dolphins need to create healthy culture in season’s finish | Opinion
As the 2025 season has matured, we have discovered that the Indianapolis Colts blossomed into one of the NFL’s top teams.
So the team that smacked the Miami Dolphins around 33-8 in the season opener owns the best record in the NFL?
The Colts (7-1) happen to be leading the New England Patriots (6-2), which escaped South Florida with a 33-27 win against the Dolphins after Miami’s special teams unit collapsed, allowing a late fourth-quarter touchdown and the offense failed to respond.
Buffalo’s Buffalo (5-2) a perennial power, and hasn’t shown any sign of weakness yet.
And the Carolina Panthers (4-4) and the Los Angeles Chargers (5-3) each pulled off nail-biting fourth-quarter come-from-behind wins against the Dolphins in wins the defense gift-wrapped its opponents.
Even though moral victories are for losers, the only loss Mike McDaniel’s team should lower its head in shame about was that 31-6 Cleveland loss two weeks ago, but the Dolphins responded by upsetting the Atlanta Falcons last week.
What does that mean for the remainder of the 2025 season, which continues Thursday in a nationally televised game against the Baltimore Ravens (2-5), who have their own struggles going on after playing all of this month without star quarterback Lamar Jackson?
We will discover that in the next three games, before Miami gets to its Week 12 bye.
“We’ve learned a lot as a team through hard lessons,” McDaniel said Monday. “It’s important we take [the Falcons win] for what it was, a complete and total isolated performance on an opponent.
“You’ll learn everything you need to know following a month or so straight of pushing through hardship,” McDaniel added. “Our team will be whatever it allows itself to be.”
That’s an interesting way to phrase it, as if the construction and coaching of the team has nothing to do with each week’s outcome.
There should be no arguing whether this Dolphins team is fundamentally flawed. This poorly constructed 2025 roster has shown us that.
The injuries they had early on the offensive line — losing Austin Jackson and James Daniels in the first game — have led to plenty of struggles offensively. Tua Tagovailoa doesn’t look like the same quarterback he has been most of his career with McDaniel.
And playing without Tyreek Hill (season-ending knee injury) and Darren Waller (pectoral strain that has him on IR last week) didn’t help.
But it’s not an excuse for failure because this season still has a pulse. The Falcons win proved that.
Beat a Jackson led-Ravens and the 2025 Dolphins will have awakened from a coma.
Some Dolphins fans will whine and complain about winning games at this point because it is hurting the team’s draft positioning. But the Tank for Tua era should have taught us a valuable lesson about team building.
A franchise either creates winning habits or they develop losing habits. Both infiltrate your team’s bloodstream, becoming its culture, and the losing habits are like cancer.
The Dolphins have had a losing culture since Dave Wannstedt’s reign ended because of poor leadership from the top down (owner all the way to team captains), and the best way to change that — outside of changing the leaders — is to learn how to win games.
These are the habits that will be embedded into rookies Kenneth Grant, Jonah Savaiinaea, Jordan Phillips, Jason Marshall Jr., Dante Trader Jr. and Ollie Gordon II, among the team’s other youngsters. I promise they will never forget this season because it lays their foundation as NFL players.
Finding NFL success isn’t about where you draft. It’s about what and who a team selects in the talent evaluation process. It’s about the makeup of the players added to the team.
It’s not the early selections that help the Ravens, Kansas City Chiefs, and Philadelphia Eagles build winning franchises. It’s the culture they create, and the habits they develop.
Look at what Mike Vrabel has done with the Patriots in one season.
New England look like a carbon copy of the tough, physically disciplined Tennessee Titans teams Vrabel coaches for six seasons. Three of those teams advanced to the playoffs.
Vrabel doesn’t have the players he needs to make New England a Super Bowl contender now, but he’s building a foundation that could take the Patriots back to the mountaintop.
That’s what the Dolphins are missing, and what McDaniel’s team could potentially be building with a strong finish.
By no means am I saying the Dolphins franchise is in good hands with general manager Chris Grier as the top figure in the football operations side, or that McDaniel can, or should be saved if he wins seven out of the final nine games, producing a winning record.
That ship has sailed.
But the culture created this season has a chance to dock here for years to come, and that’s worth far more than the first or second overall draft pick.
This story was originally published October 28, 2025 at 10:58 AM.
