There’s no question about who the hottest team in the NFL is; having ripped off seven quality wins in a row, the New England Patriots once again look like the class of the AFC, except this time without the employment of one Tom Brady (heard of him?).
The reasons for their recent success are clear. They are getting fantastic defensive play, led by a serious Defensive Player of the Year contender in Matthew Judon. Mac Jones is improving every single week and now plays smart football while still pushing the ball downfield (and dunking on all four quarterbacks picked ahead of him). And lest we forget, Bill Belichick still runs circles around any other head coach in the league.
They are dominating the headlines (and rightfully so) after a crucial Monday Night Football win over Buffalo Bills for control over the entire AFC. That, precisely, is why I want to talk about who I think is the next hottest team in the league.
The second-hottest team in the NFL right now (coached, supposedly, by the second-hottest head coach in the league) continues to fly under the radar. They haven’t lost since October, having won five straight games heading into their bye to carry them from an afterthought in the AFC at 1-7 all the way to a respectable 6-7. After their week of rest, they will play the lowly Jets and the very banged-up Saints, wins which would put them at 8-7 and squarely into the playoff picture. They are, by all accounts, a contender to vie for a wild card berth and could realistically cause problems for whoever they play in the first round.
That team is the Miami Dolphins.
Image From: Michael Reaves, Getty Images
Just a few weeks ago, the Dolphins had absolutely nothing working in their favor, except for the warm Florida weather. The team was 1-7 with their lone win coming over the Patriots in Week 1. The offensive line was playing so poorly that it seemed they were hell-bent on getting a struggling Tua Tagovailoa injured (which they eventually achieved). The defense that was so promising a year ago was bleeding points to anyone and everyone, even the Jaguars. And the cherry on top of it all-- Miami had already ceded ownership of their first-round pick in next year’s draft as part of a trade-up package to acquire Jaylen Waddle.
Dolphins fans had every reason to be excited heading into this season. Brian Flores looked like a slam-dunk head coaching hire, as he took a team once regarded as the most devoid of talent in the league to a 10-6 record. They missed out on the playoffs, but they were never going to win the Super Bowl anyway; what mattered was their emerging defense and the play of Tagovailoa, their rookie quarterback, who had a tumultuous season to say the least but overall showed lots of promise and moxie in some key wins over the Rams and Cardinals.
Image From: Chris O’Meara, AP
Their torrid start to the season threatened to destroy any hope that Flores and his squad had built up, and combined with a lukewarm-at-best perception of Tagovailoa as the team’s franchise quarterback from fans, criticism was at a fever pitch.
Then, they won. And won again. And again, and again and again. Now, the narrative has been flipped on its head.
The defense, which struggled mightily early in the year, especially in ugly blowout losses to the Bills and Buccaneers, has tightened up and is once again playing like the fearsome unit from last year.
As we can see, Miami’s defense hasn’t just improved-- it’s playing stellar. Their points per game allowed during this stretch would rank first in the league on the season, and their yards per game allowed would rank second. Granted, they have benefitted from playing a few of the league’s weaker clubs in the Texans, Jets, and most recently the Daniel-Jones-less Giants, but dominant showings over the Ravens and the Panthers were truly impressive.
Importantly, Miami has been getting fantastic production from some of their rookies. Pass rusher Jaelan Phillips, a first-round selection in last year’s draft, recorded just 1.5 sacks in Weeks 1-8 but has notched a monstrous seven in the last five games, breaking Miami’s rookie record for sacks with four games to spare (to this day, I still have no clue how he fell to the Dolphins at pick #18).
Second-round pick Jevon Holland has been a revelation at the safety position of late, most notably giving Lamar Jackson and the Ravens fits operating out of their Cover 0 blitzes. He just seems to fly around the field and be everywhere at once, a weapon on defense that few teams have the luxury of. Perhaps most impressively, Holland has played upwards of 97% of defensive snaps in all but one game since Week 5, with the lone exception being a blowout win over Carolina.
Image From: Eric Espada, Getty Images
Plenty of other contributors have been playing at a high level on this defense, too, in both the front seven and the secondary. Brandon Jones has created a fearsome duo in the secondary as Holland’s safety partner, Jerome Baker has been giving the team even more versatility by splitting time playing as an outside linebacker and on the defensive line, and Emmanuel Ogbah is putting together a solid season with six sacks, 30 quarterback pressures, and a 79.9 PFF grade thus far, just to name a few.
It is no secret that Miami has tried to build their defense back-to-front, and nothing makes this more apparent than the fact that their cornerback tandem of Byron Jones and Xavien Howard have the fourth- and fifth-most total guaranteed money handed out to cornerbacks in the league, respectively. While Jones’ contract has been the subject of much criticism due to his difficulty adjusting to Miami’s system (Jones has allowed an average passer rating of 105.5 when targeted over the past two seasons, as opposed to a stronger 86.2 while in Dallas), Howard’s play has tightened back up after a rocky start to the season which coincided with a contract dispute, a holdout, and floods of trade rumors. He’s still not playing at the first-team All Pro level we’ve come to expect from him, however.
All of this is to say, the Dolphins have been playing lights-out defense recently even with subpar play from their most key players, so imagine what they could do if Howard and especially Jones really get going.
There’s a lot more that could be written about this Dolphins defense and the way that Brian Flores has been running it, but as good as they are, there will always be one man that this team’s success hinges on for as long as he is employed by the Dolphins, and that is quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.
Image From: Jeff Bottari, AP
Tagovailoa’s struggles have been well-documented by the media and fans alike since his rookie year. While criticism of the young quarterback has been, on the whole, very overblown and at times downright unfair, there were very real worries to note with his game while the team was slumping to 1-7.
Tua always seemed to be given a shorter leash than many rookie quarterbacks. Yes, he did play poorly in a couple critical games last season and was benched in favor of the veteran Ryan Fitzpatrick, sometimes with great success. But we cannot forget that Tua was thrown into a terrible situation, with perhaps the worst offensive line, a nearly nonexistent running game, and no true stud receivers (DeVante Parker and Mike Gesicki were pretty good last season, but neither of them are the safety-valve type of receiver underneath that a young QB needs). Fitzpatrick, the very definition of a journeyman quarterback, has been in that exact situation for much of his career. It was only natural that he could be a better option in some of those high-pressure scenarios.
Lost in the highly-publicized benchings were the highlights of Tua’s rookie season, most notably the three-game win streak the team went on after Tua was named the starter for the first time. His first start against the Rams, a curious decision considering that meant Aaron Donald would likely be mauling the Dolphins shoddy offensive line, was a predictably conservative and defense-fueled game, but Tagovailoa did just enough to earn his team a win. The next two games were on Tua, however, as he outdueled both Kyler Murray and Justin Herbert en route to two crucial wins in shootouts.
Image From: Chris Coduto, Getty Images
After that hot stretch came the rollercoaster; Tagovailoa struggled mightily against Denver before suffering a minor injury and getting benched for the rest of that game and the next. He returned to beat the Bengals, hold his own against Patrick Mahomes in a narrow loss to the Chiefs, and beat Bill Belichick’s Patriots to eliminate them from playoff contention. He then struggled against the Raiders and got benched for Fitzpatrick, who he had to watch secure a wild comeback victory, and got blown out by the Bills to miss out on the playoffs, a game in which Tagovailoa threw three interceptions.
Despite the mix of good and bad, the narratives seemed to be all negative, all the time. The start to this season didn’t help matters either; he struggled with injuries for multiple stretches, and threw just seven touchdowns against five interceptions in the four games he played the majority of.
Despite his injuries, the fact that his offensive line and running game were arguably even worse than what he had to deal with last year, and that those four games were too small a sample size to make any sweeping conclusions, there were still some very concerning moments. Though his stats weren’t abysmal, the simple eye test showed that something was a little off, as he had more than a few head-scratching interceptions and misfires so far off his target that the cameraman didn’t know where to pan.
Articles like these were written:
Those are never, ever the adjectives that you want attributed to your interceptions. Still, these writers weren’t totally unjustified in using them:
The first clip looks like a classic case of a very ill-fated attempt to play “hero ball”, where a quarterback tries his absolute hardest to force a play where there isn’t one. I can somewhat understand it given the situation of the play, already being at 1-5 and losing in the fourth quarter, but that’s not a mistake Tua should be making in his second year.
The second clip was where I really started to worry about him. There was no receiver present in a six-yard radius from where the ball ended up, and it prompted some difficult conversations about if he lacks the arm strength to hang in the league, or if he’ll always be hampered by his past hip injury (or even both). It wasn’t the only misfire of that magnitude on the season, after all.
Over the last three games, however, Tua has looked like a completely different quarterback:
Both the basic metrics and the eye test show a much improved player, but what’s even more interesting is that he has skyrocketed up some advanced metrics charts, despite his pedestrian start to the year. He currently ranks second in raw completion percentage, fourth in Completion Percentage Over Expected (CPOE), and eighth in Success Rate (the percentage of plays where the Expected Points Added (EPA) is greater than zero), per RBSDM.
His overall efficiency, which plots CPOE against EPA, also puts him in mostly very quality company for the year:
The reason for this stark turnaround is actually pretty simple; the coaching staff is finally making plays for Tua based on the talent at his disposal. It seems like a pretty simple concept that you should design a system based on the skillsets of the players on your team -- after all, this is what Bill Belichick has been doing with incredible success his whole career -- but many coaches somehow fail to understand this.
Previously, the Dolphins asked him to hold the ball longer, wait for plays to develop, and fit balls into difficult windows. These are all things that Tagovailoa is capable of, but without adequate pass blocking (Miami ranks dead last in Pass Block Win Rate %) or big-bodied route-running savants downfield, he stands no chance in succeeding in a system like that.
Recently, though, the plan has changed. Miami finally got wise to the fact that the receiver they traded all the way up to #6 to draft, giving up next year’s first-round pick in the process, is really good. Jaylen Waddle is being targeted more and is being fed more designed plays, and given his elite ability to gain yards after the catch due to his blazing speed, balance, and surprising strength, this has been paying dividends for both Waddle and Tagovailoa. Plus, he might have the most fitting celebration in the league.
Image From: Jim Rassol, The Palm Beach Post
Focusing more on underneath plays, such as those targeting Waddle, Tua now is second-last among all qualified quarterbacks in Average Depth of Target (ADoT), but this is actually indicative of something good. Miami is finally scheming plays to work around their poor offensive line, getting the ball out of Tua’s hands quicker and into safer windows, and it has yet to hinder the productivity of the offense as a whole. Adding more quick passes and run-pass option plays, or RPOs (something Tua is highly adept at, going back to his college days) has kept Tua upright, increased his efficiency, and has also opened up the running game a little more:
Shoring up the offensive line and putting together a stronger group of running backs could turn this offense into something a little more sustainable, but for now this system is good enough to get the job done and still has a lot of room to grow.
So where does Miami go from here? Well, taking care of business against the Jets and Saints coming out of their well-timed bye would put them at 8-7 and above .500 for the first time since Week 1(!!), but their real test will be in their final two weeks. The Dolphins will play the Titans in Nashville in Week 17 and the Patriots in a home game to close out the regular season, and it’s likely that they’ll need to win at least one of those games to have a chance at making the playoffs.
While those two teams are some of the AFC’s best, it’s not out of the question that Miami could steal a win from one of them. Tennessee has been struggling after all their injuries have begun to pile up, and heavy pressure could fluster Ryan Tannehill and force him into mistakes, like what happened in the Titans’ shock loss to Houston two weeks ago. And while the Patriots have been surging, they have historically struggled to win in Miami in recent years, winning just two games there in the last eight years.
A 9-8 record still wouldn’t be a lock to make the playoffs, as Miami fails to come out on top in key tiebreakers against other AFC teams in the wild card hunt, but it could still happen with a little help. A 10-7 record, on the other hand, would be a good bet to get the Dolphins into the postseason.
Image From: Jim Rassol/The Palm Beach Post
No matter what record Miami ends up with, though, one thing is clear-- it’s far too early to give up on this team. Brian Flores is a great coach and an even better defensive mind, Tua can succeed in the right system, and Jaylen Waddle is a true stud at wide receiver. With some more talent on the offense, this team will be going places.
So while most eyes will be on the “sexier” teams on a roll, like the Patriots and the Chiefs, don’t forget to keep one eye on Miami as well. And don’t be surprised if they make some noise in January, either.
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