No Context Miami Dolphins

Chris Grier and Mike McDaniel gave a press conference today. It was a chain of pointed fingers and excuses, infrequently interrupted by disingenuous statements that took the form, but not the substance, of accountability. No moment exemplified the desperate double-speak quite as vividly as Grier, asked by @schadjoe about the team’s failures in the years since a salary cap reset, blaming injuries, briefly contradicting himself with an empty platitude about injuries not being an excuse, and then finishing strong by blaming injuries again with a finger pointed directly at Tua Tagovailoa missing six and a half games as being “the difference”. It was a surreal moment made all the more ridiculous by its coming only minutes after Grier answered a question about whether injuries need to be accounted for better at the roster construction level with casual dismissiveness (“the injury rate in football is a hundred percent”). And if that sounds familiar, it should, as it was the same nose-blind naïveté with which he had infamously answered previous questions (“you guys are more worried than we are”) about the offensive line in past press conferences. Speaking of the offensive line, when asked about the unit, Grier first joked at his surprise the media took as long as it did to ask, then unspooled a meandering, excuse-laden string of rationalizations for both his previous (in)actions and the line's subsequent underperformance (injuries!). It was a lesson in quantum general management- we are supposed to accept the simultaneous existence of universes where Grier didn’t actually ignore the unit (hello, Aaron Brewer? Patrick Paul? ANDREW MEYER?!), that he “ran it back” for all the right reasons (they had a top offense™ in 2023), and that they know they have to invest in the unit now (and how dare we suggest they wouldn’t know that!). On the backup quarterback position, an area of obvious underperformance for the General Manager as the Dolphins cycled through multiple players who were not even with the team in training camp, the excuses continued to roll in like the tide. It clearly wasn't Chris Grier's fault. And again, the excuses had a quantum flavor. Skylar Thompson nearly won a playoff game as a rookie (editor's note: while playing terribly in the game). Tua Tagovailoa actually stayed healthy in 2023 so they never got a good subsequent look at him. Thompson won the backup job in the Spring. So clearly they were justified in making Skylar Thompson the backup. Except, in the next breath, Grier explains that "we were in on a number of top flight™ backup quarterbacks in the league- we were runner up for a couple of them." Evidently they didn't land them because of "financial restraints and compensatory pick stuff." (???). So they knew they needed a top tier backup quarterback, but they were also justified in concluding that they did NOT need a top tier backup because of their confidence in Skylar Thompson, and at the end of the day they were ambushed by "compensatory pick stuff". Is that clear, plebs? When Mike McDaniel talks about how he needs to improve as a disciplinarian, which I am sure he believes in earnest, his statements ring hollow in the presence of sarcastic interjections about how fining players has been sufficient at dealing with tardiness on every other team he has been on. It is also weakened by Chris Grier pointing at the players and suggesting they need to police themselves. They may have said the buck on team culture stops with McDaniel, but it sure seemed to get lighter along the way. And when Chris Grier talks tough about how "unacceptable" it is for the team's star quarterback to take unnecessary hits (editor's note: at rates which can be shown to be much lower than other quarterbacks in the league), it might help that message to land better if Grier accepted any, any at all, responsibility for habit of constructing rosters full of veterans with massive amounts of tread worn off their tires. It is galling to chalk up the failure of the offensive line to injuries without acknowledging that Terron Armstead has only averaged 11 games in his 12-year career, that his backup Kendall Lamm is somehow even more injury prone and had to be talked out of retirement, that Isaiah Wynn has never stayed healthy either in college or in the pros, or that Austin Jackson has missed 29 games to injury in his short 5-year career. Equally galling is Mike McDaniel blaming a lack of physicality for his offense's league-worst short yardage efficiency over the last three seasons without any reference to a pattern of questionable, too smart for his own good play calls. And when asked whether he would continue play-calling, he insisted his keeping those duties is not "a self-serving a process," and that he does it because he is the "best person™" to facilitate it. Listen, we are all aware that at this time of year the fans and media have a bloodlust that is unlikely to be satisfied in a post-mortem press conference, regardless of how Chris Grier and Mike McDaniel approached it. But the point here is that true accountability does not take the form of empty statements followed by, in the very next breath, a laundry list of reasons why nothing was your fault and everything you did (or didn't do) was the right call at the time. It would have been refreshing to hear an honest accounting of the mistakes made by the people in charge of the franchise. What we got instead was a look at two people who appear to be better surviving than producing playoff wins. PS. Those of us on Scapegoat Watch™ will not have missed Chris Grier's conspicuous non-sequitur inclusion of the team's "medical, strength, (and) video" departments in the end of year evaluation.