Auto fill

Just reading some Dolphins news. Some of these stories seem like auto fill. Just cut the previous coaches name from the article you wrote 3-4 years ago and insert the name of the new coach, GM, Will any of these writers get more creative than regurgitating the same bullshit year after year? I'd rather have one of these guys go interview Miko Grimes. Give us something to read. Instead we get Don Shula supports Adam Gase. Well no shit! They will be saying the same thing with our next coach in 4 years.

CarsonChris wrote:Just reading some Dolphins news. Some of these stories seem like auto fill. Just cut the previous coaches name from the article you wrote 3-4 years ago and insert the name of the new coach, GM,  Will any of these writers get more creative than regurgitating the same bullshit year after year? I'd rather have one of these guys go interview Miko Grimes. Give us something to read. Instead we get Don Shula supports Adam Gase. Well no  shit! They will be saying the same thing with our next coach in 4 years.

I was thinking the same thing.  Shula supports every coach we hire...I remember he had a lot of good things to say about Philbin. 

I'm sick and tired of all this crap.  I suppose it's fun when your team actually wins games, but we hear this same crap over and over and every season the Phins blow.

I do have to say that I'm amazed at how many Dolfans blindly jump on the Gase bandwagon and assume he's going to get us to the top.  After all the beatdowns I've suffered at the hands of this garbage franchise, I need to see proof before I believe.  Gase looks like a young, still-wet-behind-the-ears version of Joe Philbin to me, and I'm going to need to see some wins before I annoint him as a savior.  I've seen this movie too many times...Cameron, Saban, Sparano, Philbin...it's all bullshit.  If Gase is different, let's see it. 

Going to be a loooong offseason...

Totally agree JMP.

I will assume nothing. Sure, I hope Gase does well, turns this team around and makes us relevant again. I'm sure we all do.

Hope is one thing. Assume? No. No way.

Oh, and you can add to your list Jimmy Johnson and Bill Parcells. Both of them quit before the job they promised was finished.

white1 wrote:
Oh, and you can add to your list Jimmy Johnson and Bill Parcells.  Both of them quit before the job they promised was finished.

Yep. 

JJ burned out...I can understand and somewhat respect that. 

But Parcells just took the money and ran...he hired two of his cronies to run the team, and neither one had any experience and both were in way over their heads.   Parcells just sat back and collected checks while the franchise was run into the ground.

Every season since '09 has been an auto-fill, can you blame the media for getting as bored with it as we are? What are they supposed to write exactly, when everything somehow stays the same no matter how many different coaches, GMs and players come in and out? Covering this team has become one of those crap jobs people have because they've got no other options.

white1 wrote:Totally agree JMP.

I will assume nothing.  Sure, I hope Gase does well, turns this team around and makes us relevant again.  I'm sure we all do.

You know me, I'll keep assuming the worst. sad pat is, I always end up being right when I do [/quote]

JMP wrote:JJ burned out...I can understand and somewhat respect that.

I can't, and I'll tell you why. If he'd quit after the '98 season with his mom dying THEN I could've totally respected that. But instead JJ CHOSE to come back, convince everybody '99 was a guaranteed Super Bowl season, and then sit around day trading on the internet while phoning it in. So at that point all respect is gone. Not to mention the whole "play GM for the Chargers and give them better draft acumen then he provided for the Fins while coaching here" act.

Agree with 316. JJ gave the Chargers far better advice than he gave Huizenga, who, you know, actually PAID him about $10 million or so. JJ sticking us with Bumstedt and advising Wayne to let him run the whole show was every bit as bad as Parcells sticking us with Sparano and Ireland.

DolFan 316 wrote:I can't, and I'll tell you why. If he'd quit after the '98 season with his mom dying THEN I could've totally respected that. But instead JJ CHOSE to come back, convince everybody '99 was a guaranteed Super Bowl season, and then sit around day trading on the internet while phoning it in. So at that point all respect is gone.

And yet the Phins still won 9 games and made the playoffs in '99, and the team that JJ built went on to have 4 consecutive winning seasons under Wannstedt, including back-to-back 11-5 seasons in Wannstedt's first two years.

Big difference between JJ and Parcells when it comes to the Miami Dolphins...JJ left the team in great shape when he left, while Parcells ran it into the ground and destroyed it.

Great shape defensively? Yes. Offensively? Not so much. JJ ruined the offense

DolFan 316 wrote:Great shape defensively? Yes. Offensively? Not so much. JJ ruined the offense

Maybe so, but the JJ-Wannstedt teams had 7 consecutive winning seasons, from 1997-2003.  That's the only stretch in the history of the franchise that the Miami Dolphins had 7 consecutive winning seasons.   I know it's cool for Dolfans to shit on JJ these days, but those were my "glory years" as a Dolfan, and I will always be thankful to JJ for building a team that was legitimately in the playoff hunt year after year back then.

My glory years were the early 80s, when the Fins reached two Super Bowls in four years (really should've been at least three ) and had the league's best regular season record.

http://www.pro-football-reference.com/play-index/tgl_finder.cgi?request=1&match=combined&year_min=1982&year_max=1985&game_type=R&playoff_round=&game_num_min=0&game_num_max=99&week_num_min=0&week_num_max=99&game_day_of_week=&game_time=&time_zone=&game_location=&surface=&roof=&stadium_id=&temperature_gtlt=lt&temperature=&game_result=&overtime=&league_id=&team_id=&team_conf_id=&team_div_id=&opp_id=&opp_conf_id=&opp_div_id=&team_off_scheme=&team_def_align=&opp_off_scheme=&opp_def_align=&conference_game=&division_game=&tm_is_playoff=&opp_is_playoff=&tm_is_winning=&opp_is_winning=&tm_scored_first=&tm_led=&tm_trailed=&tm_won_toss=&c1stat=&c1comp=gt&c1val=&c2stat=&c2comp=gt&c2val=&c3stat=&c3comp=gt&c3val=&c4stat=&c4comp=gt&c4val=&c5comp=&c5gtlt=lt&c6mult=1.0&c6comp=&matching_games=1&order_by=game_date

All Wanny did as prove how powerful a force inertia really is. It's like calling Barry switzer a great NFL coach because he didn't completely ruin the JJ Cowboys within 2 seasons (he did in four, though). And Switzer at least won a Super Bowl. It's also the reason why the damn Pats won't be going away right after Brady and Belichick leave, unfortunately (sighs).

How many AFC title game appearances in those seven consecutive winning seasons BTW? I do know they missed the playoffs entirely the last two.

I graduated in 1986, so I was following religiously from 1978 through 1985, fifth grade all the way up through high school.  The cast changed, from Griese to Woodley to Marino, from Williams to Csonka to Nathan and Franklin, from Duriel Harris to the Marks Brothers.  The constants were Shula and Nat Moore.  And every year, we were in the playoffs, with 2 Super Bowls, save for one 8-8 transition year.

Shula had to be the best coach in the game.  Only Joe Gibbs kept winning that consistently through that many changes.  May not have had a title, but a lot of wins and memorable ones in the playoffs.

Wanny was infuriating, really.  Inherited an incredible assortment of defensive talent and the best special teams coach in the game.  Made a good hire with Chan Gailey as his OC.  And then proceeded to fire Westhoff and a good O-line coach (Boudreau) to hire a couple of incompetent cronies; kept bypassing opportunity after opportunity to get a real QB in here (Green, Brees, Hasselbeck, etc) to keep Fiedler in place, even got rid of a top notch backup (Huard) to "eliminate any controversy"....oh, and kept giving away draft picks for nonsensical reasons.  His "play not to lose" coaching was bad enough, but as a de facto GM he made Chip Kelly look like George Young and Bill Polian put together.

Jimmy could have made the same recommendation to Wayne that he made to the Chargers: bring in a General Manager.   Could have gently taken his buddy aside and advised HIM to stick to coaching and not try to do everything himself.  Who knows, even Wanny might have succeeded if he had. (I doubt it, actually, since he also couldn't tell a competent assistant from an incompetent one and apparently was threatened by the former.)

I give JJ props for building a good defense, but he deserves the derision he gets for giving Huizenga bad advice.

DolFan 316 wrote:My glory years were the early 80s, when the Fins reached two Super Bowls in four years (really should've been at least three Evil or Very Mad) and had the league's best regular season record.

I was too young to see the Phins on a regular basis back then.  Only got to see the games on national TV and against the Jets/Giants.  Living in NY, there wasn't a lot of Dolphins news and of course Al Gore hadn't invented the internet yet.  I had to rely on my brother's copies of Dolphin Digest for info.

I didn't start watching the Phins on a weekly basis till about '91, so that's when my obsession/hardcore fandom truly began.

DolFan 316 wrote:How many AFC title game appearances in those seven consecutive winning seasons BTW? I do know they missed the playoffs entirely the last two.

We were still winning games and in the hunt for the playoffs.  I'll take it.

HalCHorn wrote:I give JJ props for building a good defense, but he deserves the derision he gets for giving Huizenga bad advice.

Huizenga deserves more derision for acting on the bad advice.  And like I said, we had back-to-back 11-win seasons after JJ left, so it wasn't all bad.  Wannstedt eventually ran the team into the ground, but he did win a lot of games before that.

WOW!!! All these years and I never knew you got into this so late

I did tell you from '82-85 I used to be the biggest Fins homer ever, right? Then again I was a preteen.

It's truly a sad day in not only Fins history, but world history when the JJ/Wanny Era is now seen as the halcyon days I'll just go soak a pillow with my tears now.

To clarify - I've been a Dolfan forever, since one of my brothers was a fan due to having a friend that had moved to Long Island from Miami. So I always followed them to the extent that I could...it's just that in the 70s and 80s I rarely got to see them play, so it was hard for me to really get into them the way I was into the Mets and Islanders (teams I could watch play and read about on a daily basis). Once I started going to sports bars at the age of 18 or 19, everything changed and I became the hopeless glutton-for-punishment loser Dolfan you know today.

So it wasn't that I wasn't a Dolfan in the 80s - I most certainly was. I remember watching the Super Bowls, the 85 Bears game, the AJ Duhe game, the Kellen Winslow game...all that stuff. It's just that I didn't have real access to the Phins till I "came of age". That's why I identify more with the Dolphins of the 90s than the 80s.

It helps to have a DolFan granddad living in south Florida who sends you newspaper clippings of the games on a semi-regular basis

The Fins were actually the go-to AFC team on the noon TV games where I lived. Sunday after Sunday it was Fins at noon, followed by Dick Enberg verbally fellating Elway in the late game

I subscribed to Dolphin Digest starting in 1978, so even when they weren't available on TV I could follow along closely. I kept my print subscription until 1998, when internet access made it unnecessary.

I loved following along in the early 1980's when Schnellenberger was building the U and Shula's Dolphins were near the top every year. I lost interest in the U when Jimmy took over but never lost interest in the Fins.