The Miami Dolphins‘ season is just two games old, but the overall feel around the team appears to be one of resignation to the inevitable. Miami flopped in 2024, faltering to an 8-9 record that was facilitated by six missed games for starting quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, and a locker room environment that reportedly had trouble with accountability, timeliness, and discipline. Head coach Mike McDaniel and the rest of the team’s football operation spent this offseason trying to correct course.

Their opportunity to do so came after a statement provided by team owner Stephen Ross following the final bell tolled for Miami amid a loss to the Jets.

“As the owner of this team, I am ultimately accountable for our successes and failures. We fell short of our expectations this season, and I understand and share in the frustration in our performance on the field,” said Ross via an official statement. “As we now look towards 2025, our football operation will continue to be led by Chris Grier and Mike McDaniel with my full support…however, continuity in leadership is not to be confused with an acceptance that status quo is good enough.”

Two games into 2025, the status quo appears to be crumbling further. Ross should allow Thursday night’s contest in Buffalo to make his looming decision easy based on the developments of the new year to date.

Dolphins owner Stephen Ross would be wise to let his players’ actions do the talking this week

The Dolphins play in Buffalo in two days. The Bills have been a team that has terrorized Miami during the entirety of this team’s constructed build, going back to 2019. Optimism from the outside for a strong performance from the Dolphins is next to zero.

Miami played better in Week 2, but still not good enough. They fell to New England 33-27. And the off-field opportunities for communication through the first two weeks have been even less inspiring. McDaniel alluded that his players allowed the prospect of playing a game to be too big for them after their thumping against the Colts in the season-opener. He called out a team captain, Zach Sieler, by name, for an error at the podium the day after the game — something he’d rarely, if ever, done in his previous three seasons.

The players, for their part, held a players-only meeting later that week. One report from an NFL insider disclosed that the tone of the meeting was that players needed to be accountable to each other and themselves because the NFL will judge them in a vacuum, regardless of their situation — coaching or otherwise.

Hardly a closed-door vote of confidence. It hadn’t matched the front-facing messages from the players. Moreover, the front-facing comments began to shift after Week 2. Several team leaders, including wide receiver Tyreek Hill and Tagovailoa, lamented the team’s communication operations amid two failed game-winning drive opportunities in the final moments that led to four procedural penalties in the final 3:18 of regulation.

McDaniel, for his part, agreed. He first took the blame as the head coach. But the longer he talked, the more he actually said that conflicted with that initial claim of responsibility.

“I’m very frustrated with the collective – basically, (there were) coaches and players that did not execute communication in a very dire period of the game,” McDaniel said. “With the game on the line, our communication and our substitution was not up to par, and, ultimately, I hold all responsibility for all things. I will make sure that things that should already be ironed out moving forward, we will not fall victim to the same thing again, (and) we’ll put the appropriate emphasis on that because it was not acceptable.

“We had the opportunity to win the game and we robbed it from ourselves….I got the play call in, but I need to do a better job supervising the orchestration within our multiple personnel groups.”

Miami has wrangled play clock management issues for years. For McDaniel’s answer to be “I need to supervise the personnel groups more” amid all the weight he’s already carrying between plays is, frankly, uninspiring beyond saying the right thing in the moment.

And so Ross is facing a lot of noise. Noise from his players. Noise from his coach. Noise from the outside. It all points to the same thing — the vote of confidence and extended opportunity to fix what has ailed the Dolphins from the inside hasn’t held. At least not yet. And the more the losses pile up, the uglier it is likely to get. At which point my message to Ross would be this:

Cut out the noise. Apply your team’s own mantra to your decision-making for the immediate future. Miami’s self-selected slogan for this year is “They talk, we do.”

The doing isn’t going so well. Neither is the “they talk” part, as most of the most prominent revelations about this 2025 Dolphins team are rooted in the talking going on from all parties after the fact. The players talking amongst themselves. The players talking to the media. The coach talking to the media. The coach talking to the players through the media. Where’s the “do“?

The best thing Ross can do is allow what this team does on Thursday night to tell him what he needs to know. If Miami comes out flat, Ross could, and should, end this farce before it goes any further. Because there’s a well-liked coach within the building who deserves as big a sample size to get his hands dirty if Miami’s serious about exploring his viability as a head coach.

Defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver hasn’t seen his defense take shape the way anyone wanted, but his three highest snapping players in the secondary are a safety that arrived in July (Minkah Fitzpatrick), a cornerback that arrived in August (Jack Jones), and a cornerback that arrived three weeks ago (Rasul Douglas). The team’s starting nickel is a rookie who had never played the role until Week 2 of the preseason. Up front, Miami platooned three rookies on the interior with Sieler this week. They’re young and new.

Weaver’s unit is enduring growing pains, particularly on the back end — expect it to improve with more reps. But the festering divide that appears to exist between the players and the head coach? That’s trending in the opposite direction.

Weaver received a head coaching interview from the New Orleans Saints this past offseason, a job that went to Kellen Moore. He’s reportedly a popular coach for his player relations, experience as a player himself, his accountability, and his coaching approach.

Miami had an interim head coach not that long ago who was relatively young, inexperienced, yet also possessed all of the qualities that Weaver is recognized for. His name was Dan Campbell. Campbell went 5-7 in 12 games for the Dolphins while replacing Joe Philbin in 2015, only to go coach with Sean Payton in New Orleans and, eventually, land the Detroit Lions’ head coaching position. Campbell is 37-16 since the start of his second season with the Lions (2022).

One would have to imagine that development lingers in the back of Ross’s head upon reflection of the past decade of his ownership of the team. And the fear of making the same mistake twice should absolutely be present. Which means the value of the 2025 season may need to transcend the immediate goals for playoff appearances and wins.

Miami is already among a group of 10 0-2 football teams this season — just 12% of 0-2 teams since the playoff field expanded to seven teams per conference started the season winless in the first two games. Should Miami fall to 0-3 on Thursday night in Buffalo, it would join an even more restrictive historical bucket. Just one 0-3 team since 2000 has made the postseason — the 2018 Houston Texans. They went 11-5 and won their division.

Spoiler alert: A 0-3 Dolphins team with two divisional losses will not be chasing down the Bills in 2025.

Make no mistake: this is not about being winless through two games. It’s not about potentially being winless through three. It’s about the attempt this offseason to cut out the rot from within appearing to have failed.

And the value in maximizing the time this iteration of the team has left before that rot, which has already begun to bubble to the surface, lies in assembling as much clarity and information as possible to inform the right paths forward.

And so, with a loss on Thursday, particularly an ugly one, Ross should let his players’ play do the talking and act accordingly. There’s value to be had in assessing the performance of your players on an interim basis. There’s value to be had in assessing the performance of a well-liked internal candidate for a head coaching position. And you’d be doing right by him to give him as large a sample size to evaluate his performance as possible, and the opportunity to galvanize the troops.

The players’ actions off the field, reportedly behind closed doors and in front of the podium, have spelled out the inevitability of what’s in store. Barring a magnificent upset against a divisional opponent on Thursday night, where’s the value in waiting?

The 11-day layoff between Week 3 and a Week 4 contest against the Jets marks a glorified bye week to figure out the logistics. Let these players feel the urgency. Give a young, well-respected coach a chance to work some magic. And accept that all the talk is only talk.

The Dolphins need someone to actually “do.”

Miami Dolphins News

NFL insider’s account of Dolphins’ early-season players-only meeting doesn’t paint a rosy picture for Mike McDaniel’s future in Miami

Players-only meetings are almost never good. They’re even worse before Week 2. And one NFL insider’s account of what was said makes Miami’s even worse.

Kyle Crabbs