Joe Philbin Doesn't Yell

We are in the dog days of summer football. Last week was the first real training camp, which is always prime time for knee-jerk reactions.

Chad Ochocinco had a pretty good first camp, which means he's headed to a Pro Bowl!

Ryan Tannehill struggled to adjust to the speed of the NFL game which means he is a bust!

Reshad Jones and the defense dominated the offense so the defense will be good and the offense will be bad! Or they both will be good! Or they both will be bad!

I am glued to Omar Kelly's twitter feed every day of camp, but before pads come on, it's tough to really know anything at this point. With that in mind, I will state the only 2 things I have really taken away from camp so far.

 1. I Like Chad Ochocinco
I think my recent post about him being crazy may have made it seem like I don't like him, but I do. How do you not love a guy who proposed to his girlfriend and then went right back to playing Call of Duty? If we had to trade big draft picks for him or if we were paying him huge money, his nuttiness might be a concern, but for the veteran minimum, we can just sit back and enjoy the show.

2. Joe Philbin Doesn't Yell
I am not the first person to notice that Joe Philbin is not the yelling type, but he seems to have an almost supernatural calmness about things. To illustrate my point, below is a list of Google results. Keep in mind that Philbin's photo is the closest I could find to one of him yelling and he is probably just talking.

Obviously this isn't the most accurate way to gauge things, and I'm sure he has yelled at players before, but you get my point. When we had Cam Cameron, I wrote this post about how he needed to be scarier. Cam arrived as an offensive guru who was able to generate a huge offense in San Diego with players much better than ours, but he was also a pushover and ultimately players like Joey Porter walked all over him.


Obviously, yelling doesn't guarantee success. We just had a coach in Sparano who never stopped yelling. Eventually, the team went south and that yelling fell on deaf ears. But look at the coaches of the top 4 teams last year: The Brothers Harbaugh, Coughlin and Belichick. Which of those is the soft-spoken nice guy? There are a handful of nice-guy coaches who are successful like Tony Dungy or Dick Vermeil, but there are way more successful guys who either yell, or in the case of Mike Tomlin, give looks scary enough that they don't have to.

I hope Philbin is an offensive genius and this season is the beginning of a dynasty, but whether he succeeds or fails, people will say it's because of his demeanor. If he wins they'll say it's because of his ability to stay calm and if he fails they will say he wasn't tough enough on his players. Still, if he starts using phrases like "Fail Forward Fast", I'm gonna be nervous.

Draftacular 2008

 

We did it! We played poorly enough last year to earn the #1 Draft Pick. We're #1! We're #1! Before we start celebrating too hard, we need to think really hard about this pick, because this draft, for better or worse will go a long way toward determining our fate for the years to come. There are several reasons our team is not great at the moment, but mismanagement of the draft is easily at the top of that list. In my neverending quest to help save the Dolphins, I'll give you a look at our last 5 drafts, a look at this year's top draft prospects and a look to the past for some advice from our last three coaches on what they'd do with the pick. I hope you like tables, because this post is full of them.

The draft has not been kind to the Dolphins for the past decade. If the season were to start tomorrow, less than half of our starters would be people we drafted. Here’s a look back at the last 5 drafts.

The Past 5 Drafts

	1st Rd Pick	Pro Bowlers They Could Have Drafted	Dumb Moves	Decent Moves
2002	Ricky Williams	Lito Shepard Michael Lewis	Traded two 1st Round Picks for Ricky Williams, not a brilliant Move.	Got Randy McMichael in the 4th Rd
2003	Ricky Williams	Asante Samual Larry Johnson	See 2002 for Ricky. Eddie Moore in the 2nd Rd didn't pan out.	Got Yeremiah Bell in the 6th Rd
2004	Vernon Carey	Bob Sanders Jared Allen	Giving a 4th Rd pick to move up a spot for Carey, who most saw as a 2nd Rd pick	Got Rex Hadnot in 6th Rd
2005	Ronnie Brown	Demarcus Ware Braylon Edwards	Traded 2nd Rd Pick for AJ Feely	Ronnie Brown and Channing Crowder in the  4th Round
2006	Jason Allen	Antonio Cromartie Marcus McNeil	Jason Allen Trading 2nd Rd pick for Culpepper	Derek Hagan in the 3rd. If he ever learns to hold onto the ball it will be a great pick.
2007	Ted Ginn	Patrick Willis	Too early to know for sure, but Ted Ginn at #9 was interesting.	Samson Satele in 2nd Rd

Luckily, this year we have the Tuna in our war room this year. It seems pretty clear no one wants to trade for the top pick so here’s a look at who we have to choose from.

2008 Draft Prospects

Prospect	Why He'll Save The Dolphins	Why He Won't
Chris Long DE/OLB Virginia	May follow father Howie’s footsteps and be a Hall of Famer.	May follow father’s footsteps and star in a shitty movie like Firestorm.
Jake Long OT Michigan	Huge guy, good combine. We haven’t had a Pro Bowl Left Tackle since the Macarena was the #1 song. (1996)	$30 million is a lot to guarantee to a guy a lot of people think may be a Right Tackle.
Matt Ryan QB Boston Collge	Could possibly be a franchise QB	Could just be overrated like every other Boston athlete since they had their overrated Tea Party
Vernon Gholston DE/OLB Ohio State	Combine freak, showed he is an elite athlete. He completed the 40 before the gun finished going off, then bench pressed a bus 37 times.	It would be a conversion project to get him to switch to outside linebacker.
Darren McFadden RB Arkansas	Great combine, great college career. Widely believed to be the #1 talent in this draft.	We have a ton of running backs. Also, last time we gave a 1st round pick for a RB with character concerns and a ton of illegitimate babies, he ran off to India to teach yoga.
Glenn Dorsey DT LSU	Dominating defender. Can play hurt	More suited for a 4-3. Has a bum knee.

If the Tuna needs some help deciding what to do with the pick, Here’s some advice from our last 3 coaches.

Former Dolphin Coach	What He'd Do	Why He'd Do it
Dave Wannestedt	I would trade this year and next year's #1 picks for Travis Henry.	How could that go wrong?
Nick Saban	I would lie and say I'm not going to draft anyone, then I would draft Darren McFadden.	I would draft him because I am physically unable to draft anyone who didn’t play in the SEC and I would lie because I'm a piece of shit.
Cam Cameron	I would draft FSU Long Snapper, Garrison Sanborn.	I know his family and they are good people.

Demote Jason Allen to Janitor

Nick Saban drafted Jason Allen in the first round last year thinking he had found a double threat (cornerback-safety), but since joining the Dolphins, Allen has proven himself to be more threatening to his own team, whether it's blowing his assignments or getting dumb penalties like the one he got against the Jets yesterday. The team originally saw Allen as a safety, but after missing all of camp in a contract dispute, he proved unable to learn the Dolphin playbook and failed to gain a starting spot. After a full year of failing to grasp the position of safety, the team finally moved him to the easier position of cornerback, but this too proved too difficult for him to understand. How bad is he? Even when the Dolphins use seven defensive backs, Allen is still on the bench. This on a team not exactly overflowing with talent; a team where Travis Daniels, who made Randle-El look like Randy Moss, who got stiff-armed not once, but twice ON THE SAME PLAY by Thomas Jones yesterday is a starter. They had demoted Allen all the way to special teams thinking he couldn't possibly hurt them there, but he proved them wrong once again when he erased a 27 yard return by Ted Ginn Jr. with a dumb holding penalty.

Despite repeated attempts by his teammates to convince him how cool he would be if he started a dog-fighting ring, it looks like Allen is here to stay. Since the Dolphins have 9 million dollars in money promised to him, it's unlikely they will cut him, but because he has proven that every time he laces up his cleats he is a danger to the team, Jason Allen should be demoted to janitor. Obviously it will take him a few months to learn the position and he will never be trusted with any dangerous chemicals, but at least the Dolphins are getting something in exchange for their 9 Million dollars and wasted draft pick, even if it's just a sparkly clean floor. He'll probably forget which part of locker room floor he has been assigned to mop and get flagged for forgetting to use the "Wet Floor" sign, but at least the team is limiting the damage he can inflict. If he is able to master the job and move up the janitorial depth chart, he can be groomed for other more complicated positions like towel boy or team security officer, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.