Dave Hyde: Dolphins’ Mike McDaniel keeps doing it his way, but will it pay off?
By Dave Hyde, South Florida Sun-Sentinel,
2024-08-29
Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel watches practice on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024, at the Baptist Training Complex in Miami Gardens. Joe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/TNS
Here in Year Three of the Mike McDaniel ‘s era, where football tradition collides with futuristic thinking, there’s a constant contest between progressive ideas and funny concepts like habit and ritual.
Take something as common as running sprints after practice. This has been a part of football as long as green grass and end zones. But the Miami Dolphins don’t do them. Don’t believe in them. And the juxtaposition against traditional football was noticeable this summer.
The Atlanta Falcons lined up and ran sprints in full, helmeted gear as a team after a joint practice with the Dolphins this August. It was a scene shared by generations of teams getting ready for the season. As the Falcons players huffed and puffed, the Dolphins stood on the neighboring field, pads coming off, before walking to the locker room.
McDaniel says that energy once used for sprints has been put into actual practice, meaning: “We can get an infinite amount of game reps more than our opponents.”
That’s one example of how the wheels of nonconformist change are turning inside the Dolphins . The whole league is rethinking NFL preseason and training camp in this evolving era of how to balance work and body maintenance. There’s a broad swath of detailed thinking inside the Dolphins where the question isn’t just whether McDaniel can shove the future down the throat of the football past in a manner that bears measuring.
There’s an added question, too: Who’s running this team, anyhow?
McDaniel says it’s not him, that it’s the players’ team. The players agree. Beyond not running sprints — an idea the players love — there’s the regular rotation of resting players in practices and non-traditional looks like …
“They don’t wear helmets while running drills?” a Washington Commanders’ official asked after watching how the Dolphins warmed up before the two teams’ joint practice this summer.
No player dared say that about Don Shula or Jimmy Johnson or Nick Saban with the Dolphins. Then again, look across the NFL landscape and find an old-school disciplinarian prowling a sideline. Those dinosaurs are gone. Their tight thinking went the way of McDaniel’s predecessor, Brian Flores , who had players sprint to his TNT (Takes No Talent) Wall after making a mistake in practice.
“Like high school,” one player said.
Still, no one said Flores’ teams weren’t tough or he didn’t squeeze every possible win from a talent-challenged roster. Flores led the Dolphins 10 wins in his second to last season. McDaniel’s upgraded roster has won nine and 11 his two seasons. So, McDaniel’s way is a psychological experiment in cleats: Will players perform better if given ownership of the team? Can a team get tough enough if players set the limits on work? Or does it make a tough sport too soft?
Sure, the Dolphins are the “players’ team” in some form as everyone says. But McDaniel understands real power is the voluntary constraint of it. A head coach creates the team culture even if that means allowing players to define it.
So, it’s not like his player-friendly environment has been defined by a slow start. Anything but that. It is just defining of who this team is and how it operates from daily practices to large-scale decisions.
Take cornerback Jalen Ramsey. He was locked into playing cornerback on one side of the field last year by former defensive coordinator Vic Fangio. Ramsey wanted to cover the team’s best receiver no matter where he lined up.
This provided a prism into other issues between Fangio and McDaniel’s ideals, and the upshot was Fangio left by mutual agreement and both defensive backfield coaches were pushed out (including former Dolphins great Sam Madison).
Lots of coaches have been called “players’ coaches.” McDaniel is on a new-generational tier. Players go beyond the normal apple-polishing of praising of him, too, and there’s genuine professional affection on both sides.
This way also comes with a measured amount of risk. As retired coach Saban once observed, “The very things people hire coaches for are the same thing they run coaches out of town for.”
McDaniel, the creative, new-age coach, will win because his players love playing for him. Or he won’t succeed because this was his way. Will they look at the coach as a hardened leader in tough games? Will they turn on him, even subconsciously, if the season turns south?
McDaniel put much thought in running the team in this manner, right down to the no sprints after practice and his liberal habit of resting players.
“To me the ultimate focus for our team is as rudimentary as: What do we want our football to look like?” he said. “How do we want it to feel? How do we want to approach our technique and fundamental? And so built around that is: How do we get players adept at the system, adept at the techniques, while also with the long vision of the season?
“And so for me, it’s really prioritizing how when we go, we recreate game-like enthusiasm, focus, attention to detail. That to me is how you create and build and maintain your standard. Within all those moving parts, you have to develop a trust — from my perspective, comes from whys, but you have to develop a trust with your locker room that we won’t ever shortchange the way we go about full speed stuff. But we have to dive into the science, we have to follow trends, and we have to adjust our rep counts accordingly, so that we don’t do either end of the spectrum: not prepare guys or overwork guys.”
There’s the balancing act, he knows. But the overarching idea is an idea he heard in a conversation with Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry.
“He talked about every time he shoots, his focus is the same, on the front of the rim as in games,” McDaniel said. “Well then you can do some elite stuff, but it comes back to his practice and preparation for those moments are why he can do things that no one else can.”
If so, teams will follow what the Dolphins did in summer work. McDaniel isn’t tethered to the past. The question is whether his way is the future of how teams work.
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