Mike McDaniel is breaking character, officially playing with fire amid search for answers in fallout from embarrassing Week 1 loss to Colts
The fallout of Miami’s loss has Mike McDaniel breaking character amid explaining what went wrong.
You heard plenty this offseason about the “vibes” around the Miami Dolphins. It could be debated that the merits of those criticisms amid the effort to try to change some issues around the football operation were premature or unfair to Miami. But here and now? Today?
Make no mistake about it. The vibes are officially bad.
This doesn’t have to define the season for the Miami Dolphins. But it has the potential to if things snowball from here. And as everyone debriefs from a brutal first effort of 2025, it’s notable that head coach Mike McDaniel has already broken character from his normal approach to coach, player, and locker room confidentiality.
Miami Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel is officially playing with fire in fallout from Week 1
“I think, to be honest, the positive is that (it) was a miserable experience. It was embarrassing, flat out and in that there’s nowhere to hide…I was really looking forward to see, to seeing the stuff that we’ve really worked on diligently, and I didn’t see any of it, and that’s a problem,” said McDaniel on Monday afternoon.
“It was tough to get punched in the mouth like that, because it was not a result of lack of intent…there’s a lot of guys out there trying to make plays, all things equal, that’s not necessarily a bad, villainous thing to desire. However, when your mind isn’t focused on your exact responsibilities as it relates to your teammates, and when you’re not playing…collective team football, where you are doing your job, and then one or two players on the field get to make the play. There’s a cost.”
This is fair and honest, even if it is demoralizing to think about a team coming into the season so grossly underprepared to suit up and play. The Dolphins are among the teams in the NFL with the greatest roster turnover from last season, teetering around 50% of the 53-man roster. So there’s certainly merit to what McDaniel is diagnosing for the Dolphins.
But where McDaniel went from here is where he broke his own mold — and even acknowledged it openly before proceeding to call out one of his team’s best players.
“I would say the good news is, I don’t see how it could be worse,” said McDaniel. Great.
“I’ll give an example…just so you guys know, I don’t make a habit of putting family business out at the podium. But for example’s sake, there was one play that ultimately led to being an explosive that the the utmost dependable player, Zach Sieler — in an attempt to get a sack at the final stages of pass rush, kind of voids his pass rush lane. Well-intentioned, trying to make a play, but the dropping of rush lanes allows for an explosive that you have to learn with new teammates, play with them, and lean on them, and trust them.”
I would not suspect that Zach Sieler will take any issue with being thrust into the spotlight in this manner — he’s a well-compensated leader of the team, and McDaniel’s full quote is respectful and not malicious.
But you can probably count on one hand the number of times in the McDaniel era in which he’s called out a player by name for not executing on plays unprompted. To see this on the heels of the first game in 2025, after repeatedly suggesting that his team simply wasn’t ready to play over the last 24 hours, isn’t exactly inspiring.
Accountability has been a big buzzword this offseason. But the accountability has been talked about in the sense of players amongst themselves. What about between the players and the coaches? Team captain Bradley Chubb’s comments after the game seemed to indicate that the players simply weren’t executing and would be trying to figure this out amongst themselves.
“(We were) trying to make our own thing up and not playing team football. At the end of the day, that’s what we watch the film for. That’s where we sit back and learn, see what we did wrong and correct it come next week,” said Chubb after the game. “They did a lot of the same things we thought would happen. Like I said, us making up our own stuff, and us players on the field making things up and not communicating as well as we could have. At the end of the day, it’s about learning from it, building from it, and onto next week.”
If this Dolphins season goes off the rails, this will be the fastest path. McDaniel has empowered a player-led locker room, but it’s taken all of 60 minutes of football for McDaniel to break his own habits amid the search for accountability in an embarrassing defeat. For his sake, the players are hopefully taking it as well-intended. Because if they don’t…the search for accountability will be rising up and out of the locker room and into the coaching offices — as the buck stops there for the product on the field.
The Dolphins have bigger picture questions in the upper reaches of football operations, but the avoidable issues on game days? That starts and ends with McDaniel. And even his own out-of-character examples of pointing out the missed execution among his players, by name no less, are an indictment on himself — no matter what message he thinks he’s sending.
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