by The inquiry into what went wrong for the Dolphins this season will be long and painful. They can point to the freezing weather in Kansas City and the mountain of injuries at the end of the season as reasons why they fell at the first hurdle in the playoffs, but such thinking would ignore the underlying issues. for the team during the rest of the game. season. They couldn’t beat good teams. They burned draft picks on players who couldn’t contribute down the stretch. A defense that promised to be one of the best in the league was erratic.
But those questions loom over the biggest of them all: Should the team commit to Tua Tagovailoa as their long-term quarterback? We now have overwhelming evidence that Tagovailoa is a fine point guard. Slot it into a point-and-shoot role with a great supporting cast and a great play-caller, and it can succeed. But when things go wrong – when he’s missing key pieces, when he’s forced to improvise, when his offensive line succumbs to too much pressure – he folds.
Related: The NFL has never seen anything like the rapid decline of the Eagles | Bryan Armen Graham
The options beyond Tagovailoa are limited. The team could look at a trade for Justin Fields. They could make a run at Kirk Cousins in free agency. But Cousins is coming off an achilles injury, and for all of Fields’ promise, Tagovailoa is a more seamless fit in Mike McDaniel’s offense.
Miami has plenty of talent and a good coaching staff. But they found themselves in one of the worst places in the NFL: quarterback purgatory. Tagovailoa is too good to move on from but too limited to overcome imperfect circumstances.
Dallas Cowboys: The end for Mike McCarthy?
It was just so quintessentially Cowboys. A season of 12 wins and a disastrous playoff loss. Long camera shots of a confused Jerry Jones turning to his son in his store. Stephen, do you have belichick’s number?
This was not difficult to predict. For as long as McCarthy has coached, he has built elite offenses while overseeing teams that fall apart in the postseason. When things start to go wrong in big spots, his team collapses.
The defeat of Dallas should not fall solely on the shoulders of their head coach. Dak Prescott failed again in the postseason. Dan Quinn seemed to spend more time preparing for head coaching interviews than studying the Green Bay Packers offense. Green Bay’s use of motion and pre-snap movement – the foundation of Matt LaFleur’s offense – left the Cowboys defense frustrated. Packers tight end Luke Musgrave averaged (AVERAGED!) 9.71 yards of separation per snap, record in the era of Next Gen Stats. You read that right: The average firm ended nearly a hundred down of separation on every jump.
Still, it’s indicative of a head coach being ill-prepared and unable to bounce back from setbacks. Why did the team look so fierce from the opening round? Why were CeeDee Lamb and Prescott, the league’s most productive receiver-to-quarterback duo this season, moving from the first snap to the last?
McCarthy has many excellent qualities. It’s not one of them to lead a team through the postseason. It’s time for Dallas to move on and look for a new coach who can push a talented team over the top.
Pittsburgh Steelers: Will they get a quarterback?
A toast, please, to another year of Mike Tomlin maintaining his streak of ‘not having a wasted season’ as he gets bounced in the first round of the playoffs.
Rumors swirled after Pittsburgh’s postseason exit that Tomlin, with a year left on his contract, might opt out. When asked about the state of his game in the post-game press conference, he walked out before the reporter could finish his question.
Reports now indicate that Tomlin and the Steelers are working on an extension. Bringing Tomlin back is a win; he is still one of the best coaches in the game. But it doesn’t answer Pittsburgh’s thorniest question. They need to find a new quarterback – and Tomlin needs to embrace a fresh approach to offense.
Few franchises are as insulated as the Steelers. It’s time for Tomlin to bring in an outside voice to pair with a new quarterback. Kenny Pickett doesn’t have the tools to be a difference maker in a conference that demands A-plus quarterback play. And while the Steelers are unlikely to make a splash by moving up in the draft, they should be the first point of contact for any veteran quarterback looking to push through a trade this offseason or free to move in free agency .
The Steelers have young talent all over their roster. If you’re power-ranking Cousins’ destinations today (outside of sticking in Minnesota), the Steelers should be at the top of the list.
Philadelphia Eagles: How will they fix the defense?
The end of the Eagles’ season was an abysmal failure. No team has fallen so far, at such a pace, within a season.
In some ways (sorry, Eagles fans), it helps that it went so wrong at the end. If the Eagles had limped through a playoff game or pulled out a few wins at the end of the regular season, it would have been papered over systematic cracks.
Philly needs a complete reset. Whether or not Nick Sirianni should stay on as head coach is debatable, but the rest of the Eagles’ coaching staff should be feeling uneasy. Philadelphia failed to build a coherent offense throughout the season, continuing into its own worst habits without any solutions to underlying problems.
In defense, things were, somehow, worse. A ton of blame will be laid at the doors of Sean Desai and Matt Patricia, the two DCs tasked with piloting the unit. But only those two are to blame. The defense faltered this year for many reasons: poor team building, philosophical flaws and an inability to master the details. The team’s pass rush was gone. The corners fell off a cliff. The middle of the defense was a sieve – against the run and the pass.
Poor training should bear a large part of the blame, but even solid training wouldn’t stop the likes of James Bradberry and Kevin Byard from ripping off simple tats.
Ultimately, however, the Eagles built a roster that didn’t fit the team’s defensive design. That’s as much on Howie Roseman, the team’s GM, as it is on the coaching staff. Solving those issues over the course of the season requires top-level talent and top-level coaching. By the end of the season, the Eagles had neither.
It will be difficult to fix the problems in one season – and a task made even more difficult by the concerns the offense needs to address. It’s going to be a long offseason in Philadelphia.
Cleveland Browns: How do they tackle the offense?
Cleveland could not legislate what happened against the Texas Texans. Their vaunted defense was shredded by Houston’s young offense. Even when they got close to CJ Stroud, the rookie quarterback put on his Cape and diced them up anyway.
A disappointing finish shouldn’t put an end to a great year. The Browns have proven they can be a playoff team and a division contender with above average quarterback play. If Deshaun Watson can come back and deliver a close replica of what Joe Flacco provided.
There will also be a new blood injection. The Browns announced Wednesday that they had parted ways with Alex Van Pelt, Kevin Stefanski’s longtime collaborator on offense. With Watson returning, the Browns need a new attitude. The Van Pelt-Watson partnership was largely a battle of two opposing offensive philosophies. Because of his huge, fully guaranteed contract, Cleveland is committed to Watson, no matter how terrible he looked for large chunks of this season. Finding a coach more aligned with Watson’s view of the game will be the key for the Browns to take advantage of whatever potential remains at quarterback.
LA Rams: How aggressive will they be in the offseason?
The Rams overachieved this season. They pushed a great Lions team ahead on the road in the playoffs with the youngest defense (so far) in the NFL. Matthew Stafford has played as well, consistently, as any quarterback in the league this season, answering any concerns about his long-term health. In Puka Nacua, they found the ideal receiver to pair with Cooper Kupp.
Now the Rams hierarchy is left with a choice: do they push some chips into the middle and try to squeeze out the last drops of the Stafford-Kupp-Aaron Donald axis? Or do they continue to build toward the future, taking an understudy to Stafford at quarterback and preserving some cap flexibility for the future?
The Rams enter the offseason in a strong position. They will have their full allocation of day one and day two draft picks for the first time in years as well as $40m in cap space, and will be able to open up plenty more.
They can choose any road they like. And considering Les Snead and Sean McVay, whoever they choose will probably be right.
