The Miami Dolphins are clearly struggling at this point in the season. Their record may not show it at 2-2, but this kind of 2-2 feels disgusting. Some teams would be more than happy to be where this team is at right now, but for me, I just feel nauseous.
This Miami team started out 2-0, with two consecutive road wins, only to flounder all of that success away with two straight home losses to their division rivals, the Jets and the Patriots, both primetime games. The Dolphins lost both games on the biggest stage during the regular season that you can have, Sunday and Monday Night Football.
The reason for my disgust is the teams failure to run the ball. Miami so far this season is on pace to have their worst rushing season under head coach Tony Sparano, and offensive coordinator Dan Henning.
Led by such stats as 3.9 yards per carry, 107 yards per game, only 1 touchdown, versus 3 fumbles, and we have ourselves a crisis here folks. Opposed to years past, such as in 2008, the year we won the AFC East Division title, in which the team ran for 4.2 yards per carry, 118.6 yards per game, 18 touchdowns and only gave up 6 fumbles, and compared to the 2009 season, where Miami ran for a 4.4 average per carry, 139.4 yards per game, 22 touchdowns and 11 fumbles, for the most of which was without starting running back Ronnie Brown, and our numbers this year look like they should belong to some other team.
But no, these stats belong to the Miami Dolphins, the owner of the 4th ranked rushing offense last year, only to become the co-holder, along with the Green Bay Packers, of the 15th ranked rushing attack.
So far, a quarter into the season the Dolphins are on pace to only score four rushing touchdowns, as opposed to 12 fumbles. Scary huh?
My theories behind the abysmal numbers is the fact that we have lost some pretty integral pieces to our offensive line over the past two years, all of our doing I may add. The trades of key backups Andy Alleman and Ike Ndukwe, as well as starters Justin Smiley, and the releases of Jake Grove and Donald Thomas, and the Fins are missing some of their most important pieces to their ground game.
For starters Smiley and Thomas benefitted the team so much in the fact that they physically dominated their opponents, Smiley with his fantastic pulling ability, and Thomas with his pure, brute strength. These were guys that played with mean streaks, which helped our cause in dominating the point of attack and the whole line of scrimmage. Smiley was described by some as one of the best pullers in the game, while Thomas just had raw ability.
These two helped the team out as well in the Wildcat area. When the "gadget" formation was first introduced, it averaged 6.4 yards per run, while last year only averaging 4.7 yards. This year, on only 16 plays, which would factor out to four per game, the Dolphins are only gaining on average, 1.6 yards per run out of the Wildcat.
I can sum up our Wildcat woes with three names. Smiley, Grove and Thomas. Smiley was able to pull people out of the equation, while Grove and Thomas dominated the point of attack, and simply mauled their man out of the play. This helped for the steady gains that we got out of the formation. But now that those three are all gone, the Wildcat is clearly suffering, and opposing teams are shutting it down with ease.
The Wildcat and the Fins power running game is the one place where Incognito, Berger, and Jerry take the back seat to Thomas, Smiley and Grove. The latter three were so physical with their men that we rushed to all new heights last year, with Grove leading the charge. Berger is clearly a downgrade to Grove, because of his inability to not be able to push back opposing nose tackles that are much more bigger than him, past the point of attack. Grove won those battles last year, and Berger is losing many of those same battles this year. In an uncapped year, I cannot understand why the team would not want to keep Grove on the roster for depth at the least. He clearly was a determining factor in our ground game last year, as well as Smiley when he was healthy, and Thomas as well.
The running game is such a big part of our gameplan, with or without the Wildcat. This Miami team is at its best when controlling the game clock, and keeping the opposing team and its offensive weapons off the field, as well as wearing down the opponents defense. Coach Sparano realizes this facet of our game as well, mentioning about his personal record today in his press conference: "In 20 of those wins, 15 times the number of rushes was greater than the number of throws. In the 17 losses, 15 times the number of throws was greater than the number of rushes."
Last year we controlled the ball for 32:03 minutes of the game, as opposed to 31:03 in 2008, and 31:32 this year.
The high time rate from last year can be attributed to the number of games where our game plan was to smash the ball down the opponents throats. This was mainly because we had a young quarterback at the helm in Chad Henne, but the R&R Express has the ability to take over games, and this was clearly showed last year.
This year we have not shown that we can control the clock with our running attack, let alone score in the redzone. Our only rushing touchdown this year came against the Buffalo Bills and their lowly run defense, courtesy of Ronnie Brown. We have not seen the ground and pound style of play that we are used to seeing out of Henning and his offense. We are not controlling the pace of the game, and as Sparano mentioned above, our record is not too hot when we pass more than we run, no matter how many yards we rack up through the air.
For our rushing game to improve, I'm looking for our team to try and establish the run a little bit more in the upcoming weeks, and for our offensive line to gain some chemistry and more physicality at the line of scrimmage. Our line will be getting rookie starter John Jerry back from an illness he contracted after Week 2, so our line should have no excuses this week.
With Sparano realizing that this team must run the ball to succeed, you would think that this team would have tried to put more of an emphasis on getting the ball into the endzone via the run game. But whether it be Henning trying to make this offense more versatile, or him trying to make his offense look unpredictable to opposing defensive coordinators, is unknown to me, but we need to forget about passing the ball to try and win, and just stick to our strengths.
I am not saying to completely forget about Brandon Marshall and our more than capable aerial attack, but what I am trying to say is that we have two great backs lining up in our backfield, why not use them more than we have?
Henning simply must give the R&R Express more touches inside the redzone. Let them do their job, and what they were brought in to do, score. We all know that these guys are very good at what they do, they were one of the chief reasons why our run game last year was ranked 4th in the league, but now that our middle of the line has changed, in which we ran behind 60% of our carries last year, our rushing attack seems to have lost all of the air that it had in its balloon.
There is still time for our line to gel and pick up the pace. While Incognito is one of the nastiest men in the league, and Jerry is physical as well, they just do not have the chemistry or specialize in one skill such as Smiley and his pulling ability, to make a huge difference on this team in such a short time.
Since the BYE week is over, I'm expecting bigger and better things out of not only the backfield, but out of the offensive line as well. This week against the Green Bay Packers can be the start of something new for this season, a couple of rushing touchdowns, and us keeping Aaron Rodgers (if he plays) off the field as much as possible.
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