When in Rome, Trust the Rebuild: Dolphins Must Stay the Course
I’m writing this column from Rome, one of the most beautiful cities on earth. A place where ancient columns rise between apartment blocks, Renaissance palaces overlook traffic-choked streets, and cobbled lanes suddenly spill into squares of theatrical beauty. It is magnificent and chaotic, elegant and crumbling, sacred and irreverent, often all on the same corner. Rome doesn’t so much preserve its history as live on top of it, around it and occasionally through it.
I’ve been here on a long weekend, an escape from the madness of everyday life to the madness of the Eternal City.
And it’s wonderful.
If you’ve never been here, then I highly recommend it. It’s a top five city in the world, and it isn’t five. It can be diabolically overcrowded in high season, but when you walk out onto the floor of the Colosseum, it all makes sense. Experiences over everything, as we say in our family.
But it also offers you a unique look at history. When I first came here in the early 2000s, the world was a very different place. Now, when you wander round these majestic streets in the magic-hour light, you can’t help but think of what’s gone before and what might lie ahead.
Whether that’s a worldview or a more simplistic one involving the things we love.
Like our sports teams.
Being here for a few days has afforded me the opportunity to take stock of the Dolphins at what would have been the end of the season’s first quarter, had we not expanded into however many weeks the league has the players playing these days.
Is it 17? 19? Do we have a fixture on the moon yet?
When is the first game inside the Pantheon?
Or have I missed it?
On Sunday, the Dolphins take on the Cincinnati Bengals at Hard Rock Stadium, almost seven years on from when both teams were pressing the reset button hard. It was, to all intents and purposes, the Blooper Bowl. Two moribund franchises faced off for the ignominy of being the worst in the league, knowing the prize for abject failure was the chance to draft the Heisman Trophy winner, Joe Burrow, fresh off arguably the greatest season in college football history.
There’s that word again.
On December 22, 2019, the Bengals entered the game at 1-13 while the Dolphins were 3-11, draft implications hanging over everything. Cincinnati was in prime position for that #1 overall pick as Miami took a 35-12 lead, only for Andy Dalton to throw three touchdowns in the last 6:11 of the fourth quarter — including two in the final 29 seconds — before then losing 38-35 in overtime on a Jason Sanders field goal. The Bengals ended up with that prized first pick, landing Burrow, who, when healthy, has performed consistently like a top-five quarterback at worst, and has been to one Super Bowl.
Miami, though, missed out on the player they so desired — owner Stephen Ross sanctioned a possible trade in which the Bengals would receive five first-round picks for the opportunity to move up four places, which was turned down — and ended up with three dreadful first-round choices of their own, all things considered. They followed that up a year later by trading out of the chance to take likely Hall of Famers Ja’Marr Chase, Pat Surtain II, Micah Parsons and Penei Sewell with a ludicrous deal that saw them land Jaylen Waddle, now of the Denver Broncos.
The point of reliving that history — there it is again — is to underline something important.
After all, the past has a funny way of coming full circle.
There has been an inordinate amount of discussion since Miami’s narrow loss to the Vikings about what constitutes success. Does winning two or three games and moving yourself out of the top position count as success? Or does success, in the grand scheme of things, mean doing as the Bengals did seven years ago and guaranteeing that first overall selection and the latitude to dictate the board in a very strong draft class?
Both sides of this debate have weighed in heavily. And while social media isn’t a barometer for anything, it offers a fascinating lens into the world of your average fan.
There are many who say that there is no guarantee of what will happen between now and April. And, in many regards, they’re right. The world is in flux.
Others argue the guarantee is there; it plays for Ohio State and wears number four. Some fans want to win no games; others want to win three but know that five will never happen. So what’s the point? Others argue that, at some point, the expectation of losing will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Defeats breed resignation, resignation breeds more defeats, and suddenly the road to the number one pick begins to feel inevitable. Yet I’ve been in plenty of locker rooms. Players do not give a single damn about what’s going to happen in the draft, in the main, because there’s absolutely no guarantee they’ll be on the team. So why would they “tank” for something that quite possibly won’t affect them anyway?
It’s the simplest rebuttal there is to the idea of tanking. Sure, front offices can manage a decline. But they’re not the ones putting their bodies on the line every Sunday and trying to lose for an irrelevant cause.
“Hey Caleb, just drop this game-winning touchdown pass because Sully prefers Colin Simmons at four to Cam Coleman at eight. There’s a good soldier.”
What’s interesting for Miami right now—and moving forward—is how hard the team is playing for Jeff Hafley. And of course, this too engendered a lot of responses when I tweeted something similar towards the end of Sunday’s game. Some people called the idea a “loser mentality.” Others said they didn’t want to win a “participation trophy”. I understood neither point, because they weren’t actually relevant. Playing hard when you’re not winning isn’t a loser mentality. It’s playing hard when you’re not winning. Plenty of teams in all sports don’t play hard when they lose a lot.
End of discussion.
Look, here’s where the rubber meets the road: I don’t actually think this team is very far away from being good, and it’s a column I’ll get into next week. But if you get the chance to draft a Jeremiah Smith, then you take it. Because it’s been obvious since he was a freshman in high school in Miami that he was different. The same way Jerry Rice, Randy Moss, Calvin Johnson, Julio Jones, and Ja’Marr Chase are different. And people can pontificate all they like about Marvin Harrison Jr., but under no circumstances did anyone ever have him in the same rarefied air as Smith.
Ever.
They just didn’t, and anyone who said they did is bending the truth in impossible ways.
No two drafts are the same. So no two sets of circumstances are the same. So when people argue that wide receivers taken first overall haven’t haven’t translated into Super Bowl success, the easy counter to make is that only two passers this century have won it all having been taken with that number one pick. And of course, you can get good players anywhere. History tells us that to be an absolute and undeniable truth.
But that alone shouldn’t stop you from drafting a player who might well be the best at his position in the history of college sports. Especially for a team desperate for players who can change the… history… of the most moribund skill position groups in recent… oh, you know.
It’s also not a cultural issue to lose every game in a season. It just isn’t. The idea that culture is defined solely by wins and losses is utterly redundant. Did the Patriots have a bad culture when they lost the Super Bowl last year due to “mistakes”?
Or did they just play one bad game?
You can lose all seventeen games this season and still create great habits and an incredible culture. Losing builds character. It builds togetherness. It shows who’s prepared for the fight. Who can handle adversity. It quite literally pieces together an identity that illuminates, like never before, where the bottom of the barrel is and makes you understand more than anyone who’s never been down there that they will not get dragged into that pit of suffering again.
How do we know this?
History.
Because if Rome teaches us anything, it’s that ruins aren’t the end of history. Sometimes they’re where the next chapter begins.