After Don Shula
Don Shula alongside his two Lombardi Trophies, testaments to his legendary intensity.
On the morning of May 4, 2020, the football world woke to tragic news: Don Shula, the iconic coaching legend who headed the Miami Dolphins for 26 seasons, had passed away at the age of 90. His career stretches back far beyond the births of many whose task it now is to remember the man: he was drafted into the National Football League in 1951, the second year after the NFL had absorbed several teams from the short-lived but enthralling All-American Football Conference, including the defending world champions, the Cleveland Browns, who took a chance on the local kid who’d shown atypical skill as a college halfback and might have the proper set of traits to transition to defense in the pros. But Shula’s life in football began before even this. In 1945 he got his start in the game, signing his parents’ signatures in a daring forgery to join his Ohio high school’s football team despite recovering from a grievous spell of pneumonia and incurring maternal wrath the year before in an earlier attempt to join. Now a true football player, he had an immediate impact, leading Harvey High School to a 7-3 record as a single-wing halfback, alternating between passing and rushing prowess as a do-it-all prep player. Having immediate impacts and leaving difficult-to-fill vacuums of dazzling leadership ability was a hallmark of Shula’s incredible life: the 1945 Harvey football season was the first winning season the squad enjoyed in 18 years. His multitalent as a plug-and-play high school athleticism sparkplug was manifest in more sports than football, as he was conferred 11 varsity letters in his prep career, a number which seems utterly incomprehensible to people like me who toiled with minimal effectiveness to garner even one. Following his noted career at the Ohio high school he enrolled at John Caroll University on the suggestion of a local football coach who sympathized with young stars like Shula who, despite a more than storied precollegiate career, encountered considerable difficulties receiving scholarship offers as the G.I.’s returned from Europe and the Pacific after the conclusion of WWII. Only a stone’s throw from downtown Cleveland, Shula made an immediate impact again, helping to crush Youngstown State as a stand-in freshman in 1948, a performance which entitled him to a full scholarship. In 1950, his senior season, he needed to make a choice: he was an uncommonly proficient football player but was diminutive in stature compared to the pros, and no amount of moxie or meanness or mastery of the game could sway pro coaches entrenched in their beliefs about the proper height and weight of ideal NFL players. As such, he considered very seriously pursuing a career in the ministry, but like another midcentury coaching giant whose passionate faith made deciding on a coaching career a difficult, he determined that his love for the game of football was simply too great to abandon in favor of an ecclesiastical life, and joined the local NFL team after Paul Brown drafted him in the ninth round of the ’51 draft. He and college teammate Carl Taseff were the only rookies to make the cut roster for the Browns in 1951. As in high school and college, he had an immediate impact, appearing in every game and recording 4 interceptions while helping the team reach the league’s championship game where they fell to the Rams and their historic offense, 24-17. He bounced around the league for the next several seasons, notching 21 interceptions before hanging up his cleats in 1957. After a couple years as an assistant coach at Virginia and Kentucky he became the defensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions in 1960. Still riding the cresting wave of success and relevance that they enjoyed in the 1950s with greats such as Bobby Layne and Dick Lebeau, Shula helped the Lions to winning records in his three years with the team, allowing an average of 15 points per game and never finishing worse than third in scoring defense.
Then he was tapped by then-Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom to be head coach of the Baltimore civic institutions (perhaps because he shared a name with Shula’s alma mater). The Lions immediately devolved into mediocrity following Shula’s departure, going 5-8-1 and failing to reach the playoffs until 1970. The Colts, meanwhile, finished 8-6 in Shula’s first year as head coach, only a 1 game improvement from their 7-7 1962 season, but Johnny Unitas led the league in passing and reduced his interceptions thrown by 9. The following year the Colts went 12-2, fielded both the highest scoring offense and the stingiest scoring defense and reached the championship game but fell to Shula’s old draft benefactors Cleveland. In 1965 they went 10-3-1, then 9-5, then 11-1-2, but failed to reach the championship game in any of these years; amazingly, in 1967, they did not even qualify for the playoffs despite losing only one game. Then came 1968. The 1968 Baltimore Colts were one of the greatest teams of all times, going 13-1 and winning games by an average of 29-10. They dispassionately smashed their NFL Championship opponents the Vikings 34-0 and proceeded to the Super Bowl. But Broadway Joe Namath’s prophetic potency proved too powerful for them, and they lost in the biggest upset in Super Bowl history, 16-7. The following year, despite going 8-5-1, the Colts failed to win their division, and that was it for Shula in coaching.
In Baltimore, that is.
The Hostile Takeover: The Don Consolidates His Power
In a stunning and probably unfeasible move by modern standards, Don Shula departed the Baltimore Colts after 7 seasons while still under contract. Even though he was winning an average of 10 games per year – and this was when seasons were 14 games long – he probably saw a travel brochure, looked around downtown Baltimore, and decided it was high time to make for sunnier football climes.
The triple-headed cadre of backs that made the Dolphins’ 1970’s engine run: Jim Kiick #21, Larry Csonka #39, Mercury Morris #22.
The Colts seemed to have stagnated under Shula. They could still win close to 70% of their games in most seasons, and they still had an adamantine corps of talent around which to design gameplans, but when a team loses in the Super Bowl that they were favored to win by 18 points against a team whose league had not even existed for a decade, ownership may grow weary of seasons that do not conclude with ring-fittings. Carroll Rosenbloom, likewise, is not a notoriously patient owner. Recalling the turbulent and confusing period during which Shula’s abrupt taking-of-leave from the Colts was still awaiting finalization, center Bill Curry remembers Rosenbloom saying, “Men, I’m not in this business to be humiliated and embarrassed, to come in second place, ever. I’ve already fired one head coach who won two world championships for me. I want you to understand one thing: I’m interested in dominance.” Such an outlook would probably not have made his looming head coaching vacancy a desirable destination, and as such he eventually decided to elevate Colts staffer Don McCafferty to the empty helm. The other Don, surname Shula, was having none of it, and his career diverged southwards.
I. Perpetual Motion
It is unclear what exactly transpired that led to Shula’s acceptance of the Miami head coaching job whilst still serving in that same capacity for Baltimore. Ernie Accorsi, eminent NFL historian and former executive, recalls that a phone call was placed from the office of Dolphins owner Joe Robbie to Colts headquarters, where he inquired as to the availability of an audience with Don Shula. We do not know to this day what Steve Rosenbloom, who was manning the phones while Carroll was on holiday, said to Joe Robbie, but regardless, an agreement was reached between the young veteran Ohioan head coach and the Dolphins owner while the throne of ownership lay vacant. Shula was no longer Colts head coach, he was Dolphins head coach. “Tampering!” cried Carroll Rosenbloom upon returning and learning the outrageous news. Commissioner Pete Rozelle listened sympathetically and, uncertain of the allegations’ factuality, sided with the jilted Rosenbloom and confiscated the first round draft pick of the Dolphins, awarding the forfeited choice to Baltimore. But no matter – the Dolphins had their man.
To that point in history the Dolphins had been pathetically inept. The Dolphins had entered into existence in 1966, and in their four years before Shula’s takeover they had won merely 15 games. They were horrifically bad. They were suffering through the unmistakable and agonizing throes of being an expansion team, but compounding this challenge they were scraping the bottom of the barrel of a league that was beginning negotiations to merge with a larger league, the NFL. In essence, the Dolphins, who joined pro football in the Great Expansion Year of 1966, were competing both against the established AFL teams and the rota of rosters in the NFL. It was an almost unwinnable conundrum to be in. The 1970 merger would assist the fledgling Fins in their bid to join the ranks of the competitive, but they would need a puissant force to push them into the fray of non-pushovers. They got that in spades.
Shula’s onfield demeanor at practice was legendary. There is scarcely another coach in sports history whose regimen of training for his players was so universally feared and esteemed at the same time by the troops. “He was like an evil spirit with infinite energy,” remembered Larry Csonka. Manny Fernandez spoke in gruff non-nostalgic tones about four-a-day practices and the prohibition of water on the practice field. Still others recalled his seeming superhuman ability to focus on many different facets of practice at once, in one instance calling out a player for poor execution in a drill that was going on behind him, as if he had 360-degree vision. But the worst of it was the infamous and ubiquitously despised custom of the after-practice twelve-minute run, whose dismaying enervation is still spoken of in trembling tones by such titans of the game as Larry Little, who reminisced once about collapsing during the aerobic act of attrition once and was told by the on-site medic who came to inspect the fallen gladiator, “Larry, there’s not a damn thing wrong with you.” Little settled on an invented sinus condition to explain his failure to complete the grueling ordeal.
Shula’s methods seemed Augean to his players but they paid off almost immediately. As in Detroit, his impact was palpable from the moment he and his polyester shorts stepped imperiously onto the South Florida turf. They more than tripled their wins from the year before, going 10-4 and qualifying for the playoffs, where they fell to the mighty Oakland Raiders. The next year, in an act of parallelism that closely mirrored his first two years in Baltimore the decade previous, the Dolphins scaled even further vertically on the mountain of pro football, going 10-3-1 and reaching the world championship. On the way they faced the Kansas City Chiefs in the Divisional round, defeating KC in what remains to this day the longest game in pro football history, 27-24. Then he got a mouth-watering serving of revenge when Rosenbloom’s Colts came to Miami and were shut out and humiliated in the early-year sunshine, 21-0. The Dolphins, two years removed from a 3-win season, headed to the Super Bowl, but they were simply not the equal of the powerhouse Dallas Cowboys, and they lost 24-3. There are almost no highlights from this game that the casual fan can remember, but one of note is the longest sack in terms of lost yardage in NFL history, a 30 yard loss authored by Bob Lilly.
Dolphins players asked for their recollections of the game impart that it was the very worst loss of their football lives. “In the parking lot, I cried,” Manny Fernandez remembered. “The last time I cried was when Old Yeller died,” Larry Csonka chastised, but the writing was on the wall: that one stung, more than any other. Similarly to his Colts in Baltimore, Shula’s first Dolphins could not finish the job in the big game and rather than lauding themselves for coming that far, the game haunted the players, an indestructible omen of failure. That game took place on January 16, 1972. They would not lose again in that year.
II. The Mountaintop
Coming into training camp, the Fins were pissed off. Csonka, in what he insists is not apocryphal, recalled Don Shula saying in an early training camp meeting, “Our objective is to go 17-0.” Now, it is uncertain whether this is the sort of thing Shula said as a throwaway statement – Chan Gailey, fronting an utterly forgettable Bills team in 2011, made humorous headlines when he said “I expect to win every one of them. I expect to be undefeated” – or whether (at least in Csonka’s recollection) this was a true and important guiding mission statement for 1972. Whether it was or not, it sure as hell worked. The Dolphins won their first game against a team they’d bested in the playoffs the last year, Kansas City, 20-10. Then they beat the Oilers in their second game, 34-13. Then they beat the Vikings, 16-14, then the Jets, 27-17, then the – well, you get the idea. They went undefeated, the only 14-0 season regular season in history to that point, and along the way they beat Shula’s old Colts twice, 23-0 and 16-0. Then they smashed Cleveland 20-14 and despite having to travel to Pittsburgh due to the NFL’s old antiquated playoff seeding system, they beat the Steelers as well, 21-17. In the Super Bowl the Dolphins took a 14-0 lead and could have pulled off one of the all-time numerological symmetry feats in sports history by kicking a field goal to go up 17-0 in a 17-0 season, but Garo Yepremian furnished sports entertainment with a flub for the ages, and Garo’s Gaffe ended up being the best highlight from a truly uninteresting game. In 1973 they were almost as good, but faced a far stiffer schedule – the best teams they played in the ’72 regular season, the Giants and Chiefs, each went a measly 8-6 – and finished 12-2, giving up a ridiculous 6.6 points per game from Week 4 to Week 11 and averaging 28 points per contest in the 10 games between their two losses. But they were at their apex in the 1973 postseason, pulverizing every opponent by at least 3 scores and avenging their shocking Week 2 loss to the Raiders in the Conference Championship, 24-10. They easily handled an overmatched Vikings team in the Super Bowl, providing an antediluvian pigskin blueprint for what Kyle Shanahan attempted to do in the 2019-20 playoffs, with Bob Griese throwing a mere 7 passes while Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick and Mercury Morris cut through the Purple People Eaters like Tonka trucks through toy soldiers to the tune of 53 rushes for 196 yards.
These were the glory days for Miami. Before the birth of the Steel Curtain and following the passing of the Power Sweep Packers into the annals of history, there was a massive, unnavigable gap between Miami and the second best team. No other franchise from Don Shula’s first year in 1970 to their first losing season in 1976 was as dominant in the regular season, winning at least 10 games each season and posting an unapproachably dominant 32-2 regular season & postseason combined. No team won more Super Bowls during this six-year period, either. Their point differential was 863 over the six-year period from Shula’s takeover to 1976, when the Cowboys, Steelers and Raiders had moved firmly ahead of them, but the window of truly nonpareil football was 1971-1973. In each of these seasons, the Dolphins scored at least 300 points and held their opponents under 200, and the average final score of a Dolphins game was 25-8 (we’ll say 24-7, a much more normal score and basically the same thing). If you were a betting man or woman, you could safely rely on the Dolphins to outscore their opponents by 17 points on a weekly basis during this period, an outrageous figure.
The marriage of dominant, run-oriented offense and error-free defense was what allowed the Dolphins to go on their unprecedented run of destructive winning. They weren’t necessarily the best offense in the league (the Cowboys outscored them in 1971, and they were fifth in scoring in 1973) and they did not have the most formidable defensive reputation (spurred on by a denigratory Tom Landry comment, they became famous for their very anonymity and are remembered today as the No-Name Defense), but one thing they were unquestionably the very best at was not making mistakes. It can be taken as truth or scoffed at as impossible, but Manny Fernandez, recalling the flawlessly-oiled winning machine that was the 1972 team, has stated that in that entire season, there were only a total of 9 mental errors made on the defensive side of the ball. One has to assume a similar level of faultlessness was achieved on the offensive side as well, given their prolific output of scoring.
But after 1973, the Dolphins would win no more Super Bowls. They would get there again in 1982, when they lost to the Redskins, and in 1984, when they lost to the 49ers. Since then, they’ve not been back. They came close several times – 1981, 1985, 1992 – but could never drive the stake through the beast that was their Super Bowl drought since 1973. Shula toiled at the task up until 1995, but after the conclusion of that season, he’d decided that enough was enough and set aside the clipboard for the final time. He left a legacy of 347 wins, the most ever by anyone. His teams finished with a losing record twice in 26 years. He retired with as many Super Bowl wins as sub-.500 seasons, and as many perfect seasons as seasons with double-digit losses. His teams were a fixture in the postseason from the assassination of JFK to the end of the Bosnian War. On his watch, the Dolphins reached a single-season zenith of pro football perfection that has not been equaled since, and themselves saw to it that another team often lauded as the best ever would not match their supreme achievement, in so doing providing America with the most-watched Monday Night Football broadcast of all time.
Before Don Shula, they had been an abysmally listless expansion outfit. With him, they were champions.
After Don Shula, the Dolphins have returned, perhaps permanently, to the shadows.
The Long Hereafter: The ‘Fins Since Shula
If you like, you can split NFL history into Before, During and After Don Shula. Some teams thrived before his arrival in coaching, some thrived after. The Dolphins were the class of the NFL while he was their head coach, and they have been for the most part a shabby nonentity since.
A shot from the Jaguars-Dolphins 1999 Divisional Playoff, Dan Marino’s final game and one of the most outrageous moments in the history of American professional sports.
The issues that the Dolphins faced during Don Shula’s post-1975 tenure were largely defensive. They were at one point conferred the honorific nickname “The Killer Bees” due to the pervasive appearance of the alphabet’s second letter in their defensive starters’ nomenclature: Bill Barnett, Bob Baumhower, Doug Betters, Glenn and Lyle Blackwood, Kim Bokamper, Charles Bowser, and Bob Brudzinski anchored a team which reached the Super Bowl in 1982. On the way there they defeated the Patriots 28-13, the Air Coryell Chargers 34-13, and the Richard Todd Jets 14-0. But in the Super Bowl they surrendered 27 points to the Washington Redskins, kicking off a series of playoff failures that almost cannot be equaled in terms of ugliness and fruitless futility.
Of course there were bright spots. Dan Marino, one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, deserves his own laudatory laurels, but at times it seemed he was doing everything himself and praying that the eleven guys who played defense would give up fewer than 30 points. In the playoffs, they rarely did. Marino did reach a Super Bowl in 1984 – had he been named starter earlier in 1983 they might have finished with a better record, and who knows if they could have wrestled the ’83 conference title from Oakland – but they were blown out by the 49ers, 38-16. The year before, a far less imposing team, the Seahawks, had stacked 27 points on them. In 1985, they got as far as the Conference Championship before Tony Eason’s New England Patriots bumbled their way into 31 points. That was as close as the Dolphins got until 1992, when the K-Gun Bills nuked them in Orchard Park with 29 points. In between these Conference Championship appearances they made the playoffs once, losing to Buffalo 34-44. In their final two seasons with Shula the Dolphins lost in the playoffs to the Chargers, 21-22, and the Bills again, 22-37. Then Shula retired and an era was closed.
III. The Fins Adrift
The Dolphins do not exist in the same realm of spacetime as you and I. At least, they have not since 1995. Sure, they feel the passage of years and presidents and history the same, perhaps, but they do not experience the growth or decay that accompanies years winding by. Since 1995, they have been the same: a listless franchise, occasionally poking their heads above the dingy mundaneness of the regular season into the firmament of the playoffs, only to be viciously hammered back down like a reviled misfit whack-a-mole. They are living a different history than us. They do not experience the Common Era, and in a perfect world, their seasons would not merit description in terms of the Anno Domini time scale: they exist in their own period, the After Don Shula Period.
We can count their post-1995 C.E. seasons as such, but since it might be confusing to those who are unfamiliar with that scale, we will continue using the regular scale for now. In 1996, they fell off immediately, going 8-8 and falling from 7th in points and 8th in offensive yards to 13th and 14th respectively. Get used to this because it doesn’t get any better. Ready for this? One of the most incredible statistics you’ll ever see in a football database is this: With Don Shula as head coach, the Dolphins finished with a top-10 offense 15 times in 26 seasons. Since his retirement, they have finished with a top-10 offense exactly zero times. The laws of probability and likelihood make such a sustained streak of sagging offensive output almost impossible, and yet here we stand. Even with Dan Marino and Jimmy Johnson, two Hall of Famers, they barely squeaked in to the postseason in 1997, and couldn’t do anything against the defending AFC champion Patriots, losing 3-17. This would become a pattern, too: in their 31 playoff games with Shula, the Fins averaged 22.4 points per playoff game; in their 10 since their retirement, they have averaged merely 10.4, a full 12 point difference owing to a change in head coach.
It goes without saying that Don Shula is the greatest head coach in Dolphins history and perhaps even in pro football history, but nothing explains the sheer solid dropoff that the Dolphins suffered after his retirement. They regressed significantly, and though they have made the playoffs several more times than teams like the Texans or Browns, they have been by far the worst playoff team since 1995, which was coincidentally the year the team moved to 30 teams. The latter years of Shula saw the Fins routinely give up a lot of points, but you could usually count on them to at least make the game interesting by scoring a fair amount of points themselves; they were shootout specialists, so to speak. With the departure of the Don, the scoring went out the window too, and they embarked on the most abysmal run of playoff failures imaginable from 1997 to 2001.
Looking at Dolphins playoff games after 1995 is like looking at a series of high school intersquad scrimmages between varsity and JV. The only games that go in the favor of the underdog Dolphins are two tense, grinding, low-scoring, and altogether bizarre affairs that usually involve massive underperformances from their opponents. In the 1999 wild card playoffs the Seahawks accumulated a total of 171 yards in a 20-17 Dolphins win, racking up a laughable 2.05 yards per rush and 5.4 yards per pass. If you can name any offensive starters for Seattle from that game, you win. In a tragicomic twist, the last game at the Kingdome was a game when the Seahawks finished with a ridiculously low amount of offensive yards, a game which came 30 years and 2 months after Seattle registered the worst offensive performance in history by going for -7 total against Los Angeles. They managed a clean 3.0 yards per play against Miami, one of the worst playoff totals in history. But Jon Kitna’s game was worse than the total yards indicate: he threw for only 14 completions all day, was sacked 6 times for 32 yards, and threw 2 interceptions. His longest pass travelled 22 yards. He was sacked more times than he converted third downs (they were 5-15). And that’s how the Dolphins earned one of their two post-Shula playoff wins.
Their other playoff win since 1995 was, given the circumstances, far more bizarre. They won the East in 2000, one of only 2 since 1994, but remained a relatively weak entrant into the 2000-01 playoffs. By contrast, their wild card opponents, the Indianapolis Colts, looked potentially formidable: Edgerrin James had led the league in rushing for the second straight year, and league-leading passer and touchdown pass champion Peyton Manning had quietly put together one of the better quarterback seasons of the last 20 years. Many would take the triple combo of the league’s leading passer, leading rusher and receptions leader (Marvin Harrison) over Jay Fiedler, Lamar Smith and Oronde Gadsden. But funny things happen in the playoffs. Early in the contest the Colts jumped to an early lead, spurred on by numerous third- and fourth-down failures by Fiedler, including a 4th and 6 incompletion on their first drive and a 3rd and 14 interception by Chad Cota. The Colts took advantage of the first of these game-management errors, kicking a field goal after the 4th down failure. Then, after the interception, the Colts appeared to be lining up for a field goal, but holder Hunter Smith inexplicably took off as though he were conducting a fake field goal. This had no chance of working and he was tackled well short of the first down, officially tallying a -6 yard play. But on the very next play Fiedler threw another interception, and this time the Colts capitalized, scoring a touchdown and then taking the aggressive route by going for 2 and converting to go up 14. But from there it was almost all Dolphins. Lamar Smith set an NFL playoff record by running the ball 40 times for 209 yards, and was the driving force behind one of the most labored and tortuous game-winning drives you’ll ever see, cementing his record with 6 carries on the Dolphins’ second drive of OT which culminated in a 17-yard Smith touchdown run. The Colts could have won the game after forcing a punt on Miami’s first overtime drive, but as he was wont to do, Mike Vanderjagt missed a 49-yard field goal that would have summarily ended the game right then and there. This, after he had made a 50-yarder to put the Colts up 7 before Fiedler embarked on a surreal 14-play game-tying drive. Despite it being less notorious than the explanation-defying 41-0 loss to the Chad Pennington Jets in 2002 and the 31-28 home defeat to Billy Volek and the Chargers in 2007, this has to go down as one of the more maddening Peyton Manning playoff losses because of how wildly off-kilter his opponent, Fiedler, played throughout the day; he (Fiedler) is one of only 3 quarterbacks in playoff history to throw 3 or more interceptions, less than 200 yards, and take multiple sacks in a victory. One of the others, coincidentally, was David Woodley, Shula’s old quarterback from 1983.
IV. Killer Whales
We’ve looked at the Dolphins’ two playoff wins since the After Don Shula era began, and both were unrepeatable flukes of some sort or another. Now it’s time to look at their playoff losses. Grab protective eyewear, because these are tough to look at.
More recent Dolphins teams to make the playoffs – in 2016 and 2008, specifically – did not have the hugest expectations going in to the game, and they were forced to face teams that made it to the AFC Championship both times. They were beaten soundly in these games, 30-12 and 27-9 in both games, but the quarterbacks of these teams were Matt Moore and Chad Pennington, both of whom were playing in relief of Ryan Tannehill and (arguably) Ronnie Brown. These guys had the unenviable task of playing against the Steelers and Ravens, both of whom were top 10 defenses in the years they faced Miami in the wild card. These Miami teams had finished 21st in scoring in 2008 and 17th in 2016. Not a recipe for success. They basically got what most people expected was coming to them.
27-9, 30-12. Embarrassing losses, certainly, but not humiliations. To get to the really reprehensible beatdowns you have to go back to the 90’s and turn of the century. We’ve mentioned the loss to New England in 1997, but it was worse than the 14-point margin of defeat would lead on. The Patriots scored all 17 of their points before the Dolphins converted their single score, a field goal from 37 yards out. Miami never entered New England’s red zone, and the Dolphins were a putrid 5-for-20 on third- and fourth-down conversion attempts. Dan Marino didn’t even crack 30 on the passer rating scale and completed merely 39% of his passes for a ghastly 3.27 yards pet attempt. And this, dear friends, was the least one-sided playoff loss of the post-Shula era.
From here it becomes almost unreasonably bad. Chastened by their poor performance against New England the Dolphins rebounded the next year and won 10 games for the first time since 1994. Their reward was to go up against old foes Buffalo, divisional demons who’d put a serious hurting on the Fins the last three times they’d met in the postseason, allowing 44, 29, and 37 points to the Bills in each of the last three meetings, losing all three. This year would be different, as it was the Bills who made fatal, back-breaking errors all game long, fumbling four times and losing all four as if they were reprising their show-stopping feat of futility in Super Bowl 27, when they fumbled 8 times and lost five. But despite being the recipients of four fumbles and an interception, Miami simply could not capitalize consistently on Buffalo’s errors, and they only won 24-17 despite winning the turnover battle by 4. This victory might have appeared to the Dolphins to be an omen of impending good fortune: they had finally slain the cumbersome playoff dragon that was the Bills, a team who repeatedly seared and sautéed their defense in the playoffs whenever the two teams chanced to meet. Having bested the divisional foes, it was on to the Broncos, the AFC’s top seed but a team the Dolphins had beaten in the regular season. It’s hard to overstate how shocking the outcome of this first game was. The Broncos had begun the 1998 season as defending Super Bowl champions and raced out to a record of 13-0, something only 10 teams have ever done. Then they stumbled against the mediocre Kent Graham Giants. The following week they played the Dolphins in Miami, somehow the first meeting of John Elway and Dan Marino in 13 years. The Dolphins absolutely man-handled the Broncos, holding Elway to a dismal 13-of-36 with 0 touchdowns and 2 interceptions. But it was what they did to league MVP Terrell Davis that was the most astonishing. Davis had arguably the worst day of his career, finishing with 29 yards on 16 carries, and given that his longest rush of the day was 9 yards, his remaining tally of 15 carries for 20 yards for 1.3 yards a carry is a mark of inefficacy by a Hall of Fame running back rivaled only perhaps by Walter Payton’s first ever career game when he finished with 8 carries for 0 yards. It was a summary pummeling of the defending world champs – the Dolphins actually finished 6th against the run in 1998 and, bizarrely, first in scoring defense, a one-off campaign sandwiched between years in 1997 and 1999 when they ranked 16th and 19th in that category. Now the Fins had a chance to stick it to the huxtables of the late 90’s NFL again. Could they do it?
In a word, no. The 1998 Broncos-Dolphins Divisional Playoff game has to go down in history as one of the all-time in-season revenge games by one player against another team. Terrell Davis avenged his dismaying outing from late December with an unequivocal eradication of the Dolphins on the ground, toting the rock 21 times for 199 yards and 2 touchdowns. They didn’t have stats for broken tackles in 1998, but Terrell Davis had to have come close to the record. Some fellow named Derek Loville added 8 more carries for 34 more yards and another touchdown to cement the game. But you could have taken away the entire rushing attack of the Broncos and they still would have won (they wouldn’t have netted bettors anyone who took them on a monstrous -13.5 line before the game, but they would have advanced to the Conference Championship no less) – the Dolphins managed a hysterical 3 points in Mile High Stadium. Not only was this field goal the lone blemish on the Denver scoreboard for a Miami team that was otherwise beaten every which way (a Neil Smith fumble recover touchdown with less than 3 minutes remaining in the game was the final Go Get Your Shinebox indignity for the aqua-and-orange clad also-rans), but it was a completely needless and cowardly one as well, as it was from 22 yards out. Think about that for a second. That means the Dolphins, who were already down 14-0 at this point, reached the Denver 4 yard line, reached a 4th and 2, and decided to kick for three instead of gamble for 7. Such emasculated decision-making makes their eventual 38-3 loss an utterly deserved send-off.
1998 ended poorly for the Dolphins. Very poorly. It’s one thing to get blown out in the playoffs, that happens to someone every year. It’s another thing entirely to lose by 35 points when you have the first-ranked scoring defense in the NFL and the other quarterback throws a mere 23 times. It equates to an utter subjugation the likes of which is rarely seen in the pass-heavy NFL nowadays. But forget circumstances for a moment, because that final score demands a bit more analysis. 38-3 is a staggering loss, more staggering than it may at first appear. In fact, there have only been 17 such games (where a team outscored its opponent by 35 points or more in the playoffs) in the Super Bowl era. They’re fairly rare occurrences. Which makes it all the more hilarious that Miami managed to wind up on the receiving end of devastating postseason misery two seasons in a row.
The first two post-Shula playoff losses for the Fins were embarrassing, one-sided no-contests. They were notable for their offensive impotence and defensive incompetence, sure; but they stand out as little more than footnotes on the stories of the 1997 and 1998 NFL seasons. Their 1999 playoff loss, however, is one of the most extraordinary games in the history of pro sports. If you haven’t seen film of this game, it is like mythology made flesh and blood. It is like watching Greek demigods play the Washington Generals. It is the act of watching a team be destroyed so swiftly that neither team ended with their starting quarterbacks in the game. It is disastrous art.
Despite riding the win against Seattle in the wild card game at the Kingdome the Dolphins were not in any way “hot” as you could have argued they were in 1998 when they defeated Buffalo with defensive suffocation and offensive conservatism. It was rather miraculous that they’d managed to beat anyone in the wild card, actually. With Dan Marino entering his 17th season, they’d begun their slate of regular season games in 1999 8-2 – hey, how about that, Father Time? – but had stumbled quite clumsily down the stretch, going a horrendous 1-5 in their final six, losing the division crown to Indianapolis and suffering the added humiliation of ceding the second-place divisional finish to Buffalo. Marino was a shell of his former self for much of this season, throwing three passes against New England in Week 6 before exiting with an injury. He would not return until Week 12, and Dan probably wishes he hadn’t, as he threw 6 touchdowns to 12 interceptions the rest of the season. Still, being that this was the strange period from 1999 to 2002 where there were 31 NFL teams, they managed to limp, bleeding out though they were, into the postseason and steal a blasé win against Seattle. Their reward for this paltry triumph was to travel cross-state to Jacksonville to play the seemingly unbeatable Jaguars, a mighty team who had lost only twice all season – both times to Tennessee, who may or may not have had an unfair advantage. All other opponents on the Jaguars schedule combined to score 156 points, and the Jags held 8 of their opponents under 10 points. They came almost out of nowhere: they were a franchise in only their fifth year of existence whose claim to fame was beating the rusty 1996 Broncos in Mile High, a stunning blow which should have forever ended the practice of resting starters before the playoffs (but didn’t) and catapulted the name Natrone Means into NFL lore. Spurred on by such a stinging playoff failure, the Broncos went on to post a 33-6 W-L ratio in 1997 and 1998, along the way pulverizing the Dolphins in their Expansion Jags revenge tour. Speaking of Natrone Means, the Dolphins probably could have used him against the Jaguars in their Divisional showdown as they posted 18 rushing attempts for 21 yards. The Jaguars, meanwhile, ran the ball 46 times for 257 yards. Gee whiz, that’s a lot of rushing attempts, you may be saying to yourself, and you’re right: it’s only happened 15 times this century in a playoff game that a team would run the ball 45 or more times (this was the second instance of it happening in this millennium). They probably ran the ball so much because they simply did not need to throw the ball. The Jaguars quarterbacks – Mark Brunell and Jay Fiedler, the latter of whom apparently impressed the Dolphins so much that they signed him to be their Marino replacement the next year – threw only 20 passes on the day, completing but 12. These 12 completions, however, travelled 263 yards, and accounted for 4 touchdowns. Factor in the two sacks the Jags QBs took and the Jags offense ran 68 plays for 7 touchdowns. That means they reached the endzone on 10% of their offensive plays. Absurd.
But that still doesn’t tell the whole story of this game. What does is the quarter-by-quarter box scoring. It almost doesn’t make sense. The Jaguars scored in four distinct ways in the first quarter alone, going up 24-0 by virtue of an 8 yard Jimmy Smith touchdown reception, a 45-yard Mike Hollis field goal, a record-setting 90-yard rushing touchdown by Fred Taylor, and a 16-yard fumble recovery touchdown by Tony Brackens. With only 12 minutes off the clock the Jaguars were up 24-0 and the game was essentially over. But they kept pouring it on Miami. Fred Taylor caught a 39-yard pass for a touchdown from Mark Brunell 12 seconds into the second quarter (31-0). Less than 3 minutes later secondary halfback James Stewart ran in another touchdown from 25 yards out (38-0). There was more than 12 minutes remaining in the second quarter, and the Jaguars had scored five touchdowns and a field goal. Think about how one-sided the Broncos game from the previous year’s Divisional round had been, and then consider that the Dolphins, without scoring at all, had surrendered as many points to the Jags in less than a quarter and a half as they did to the Super Bowl champion Broncos in an entire game. It was abhorrent to behold, and shots from the game show few moments where quarterback Dan Marino and coach Jimmy Johnson are actually looking at the football field from the sideline: they’d seen enough, the fans had seen enough, the world had seen enough. Even the Jags themselves decided enough was enough and pulled Brunell from the game up 38-0, but Jay Fiedler continued conducting the carnage, adding a field goal before the Dolphins struck back defiantly with a 20-yard Oronde Gadsden touchdown right before halftime. That was it for Dolphins scoring, but not for the Jags. They added 21 more points in the second half off of two Jay Fiedler touchdowns and a Chris Howard rushing score. The final, dizzying, vertigo-inducing, nausea-spawning score was 62-7. It is the only time in modern NFL history that a team has reached the 60 point barrier in the playoffs, and were it not for the most one-sided game in NFL history it would stand alone, a shimmering wellspring of pigskin putrescence that has only been approached once, when the record-setting 2011 Saints played the Peyton Manning-less Colts on Sunday Night Football and beat them by the same score. But that was an historically great offense versus a historically poor team; these were two playoff teams in the Divisional round. It was a catastrophe the likes of which may never be beheld again in professional football. The most lasting visual from this game – other than the scoreboard which registered a “6” in the 10s column – was when the automated sprinklers puzzlingly activated themselves late in the second half, as though the Football Gods sought to douse the blazing-hot Jaguars in baptismal victory water. Or to help the Dolphins cool off from their scorching disgrace.
Marino retired following this season, as did Jimmy Johnson. The writing was on the wall following a 55-point loss to a five-year-old-franchise: a facelift was in order. They actually managed that pretty well, kicking the tires on Jags backup Jay Fiedler who led helped lead them to an 11-5 record. Despite wresting the division title from the hot-starting Jets, the most memorable part of the Dolphins’ 2000 season was without question their 23-point blown lead to the Jets on Monday Night Football, where Arnold Schwarzenegger predicted a Jets win at halftime despite the deficit and offensive lineman caught the touchdown that forced overtime. But the Jets had to play the 2000 Ravens whereas Miami didn’t, and by virtue of the Jets’ loss to eventual Super Bowl champion Baltimore the Dolphins claimed the East. We know about their gutsy upset of Indianapolis in the Wild Card, so what happened next? They got clobbered by the Oakland Raiders, 27-0. As we know, Jay Fiedler didn’t play well by any measure in the wild card win over Indianapolis, and he continued his poor play against Oakland, which might not have been a problem had Lamar Smith had one of the greatest rushing performances in postseason history for a second week in a row. He didn’t. This time around it was the Dolphins’ opponent who pounded the rock with effectiveness, running it 45 times for 140 yards, a clean hundred yards more than the Dolphins. The Fins were forced to abandon the run early, though, since Fiedler’s third pass attempt was picked off by Tory James and returned for a touchdown. In contrast, an incredible 8 different Raiders registered a rushing attempt on the day, with Tyrone Wheatley being the lucky one to score. It’s just really hard to win in the playoffs when you lose the turnover battle 4 to 1, and when your quarterback throws 3 interceptions and no touchdowns. Fiedler’s final statline in the 2000 playoffs was 37/71 for 361 yards, 1 touchdown, and 6 interceptions. Ouch.
The Dolphins were spared the gruesome ordeal of having to play the 2000 Ravens, and even though their first-place finish in 2000 would typically mean they’d have to play the reigning champs in ’01, the league’s scheduling system was certifiably wonky from 1999-2001 because of the odd number of teams in the league. The Dolphins did eventually get to face the loaded Baltimore Ravens in the 2001 playoffs, though, after going 11-5 for a second straight year and registering as the 8th best offense in the NFL. None of their points-scoring prowess was on display when Baltimore came to Miami for the wild card playoffs, though. Even though the final score was merely 20-3 – bad, but certainly not 62-7 bad – the final score doesn’t illustrate a very vivid picture of how impossibly dominant the Ravens were in this game. The three points Miami did manage were courtesy of a Jermaine Lewis fumble – the same guy who’d run back two punts on the Jets a year earlier to giftwrap the East division in aqua and orange wrapping paper – on the opening kickoff. From that point on it was all purple and black. The Ravens rolled up 226 rushing yards to the Dolphins’ 36, and the worst of it all was that their leading rusher on the day, with 16 rushing yards, was quarterback Jay Fiedler. There was no smoothness, no flow, no procedural balance for the Dolphins all day. They attempted 10 drives, none of which lasted longer than 6 plays or covered more than 28 yards. The Ravens, meanwhile, had 2 different 90+ yard drives, one that lasted 17 plays and ended in a Terry Allen touchdown run and another where they covered a full 99 yards in 11 plays and concluded with a Travis Taylor touchdown reception. The Fins simply weren’t in the Ravens’ class. The only impact the Dolphins ultimately had on the game was on the final dropback of Ravens quarterback Elvis Grbac’s day, when Dolphins linebacker Scott Galyon sacked Grbac hard, necessitating the entry of second-year passer and noted proto-Tom-Brady draft pick Chris Redman into the game to kneel down twice. This might have had a lasting effect, as Grbac was ineffective and fitful in the next game against Pittsburgh, putting up Fiedlerian numbers in a 27-10 loss. This was the last time the Dolphins would reach the playoffs until 2008, and would then miss the postseason for another 8 years before reaching it again in 2016.
The Coach That Was
The Dolphins have had good players. They have not come together as a team or cohesive unit for a long, long time.
Sights like this were probably common prior to 1970, and they’ve shown up in great abundance since 1995.
Without Shula, the Dolphins’ win percentage is .456. They have averaged 7 wins a year throughout their history every year Shula has not been their head coach. They’ve won 2 playoff games without him, in contrast to 17 with him. They’ve never been a top 10 offense when he has not been manning the clipboard and headset on the Miami sideline.
They have had good players. Dan Marino was past his prime when Shula retired but was still one of the best quarterbacks in the league. Jason Taylor is in the Hall of Fame and was the 2006 Defensive Player of the Year. Zach Thomas was a 7-time Pro Bowler, 5-time First-team All-Pro Selection and member of the NFL 2000’s All-Decade Team. Other contributors – Ricky Williams, Patrick Surtain, Brock Marion, Sam Madison, many others – have come and gone. They’ve rarely suffered from a deficit of talent, excepting seasons when the Fins have systematically sold off their own players to rival squads. It points to a vacuum of leadership, a lack of insightful team-building, an absence of someone in a position of onfield power who has a steady and accurate pulse on the heartbeat of his team.
Don Shula, in other words, will be dearly missed. His granite jaw and ability to win, win, and win again are as interwoven into the fabric of the NFL as George Halas’s tenacious pioneering, Paul Brown’s innovations, Vince Lombardi’s competitive intrepidity, and Bill Belichick’s resourceful genius. It will be difficult to imagine a football world without the all-time winner of America’s favorite game – the Dolphins in the era after Don Shula have shown just how hard it is to return to such a winning standard after a football paragon departs.