Too Much For This Team To Overcome
It's hard to understand. You're playing the biggest game of the season and you come out flat, fall behind 27-0 and you look, well, in preseason form.
That the Dolphins came back to make it interesting should not be the story. The final score - Houston 27, Miami 20 - might have been respectable, but this team was looking for far more than that.
They were looking for a statement game, and they didn't get it.
It's one thing to be scrappy and have plenty of heart. It's better, though, to be good and brimming with talent. These Dolphins just aren't there yet. They gave us some memorable moments and made things interesting late in the season.
But the finishing kick just wasn't there. The flaws that we've noticed all season simply were too much to overcome in back-to-back losses to Tennessee and Houston. The Dolphins have some good players, but they need more. They had some promising moments, just not enough of them. They gave us hope, but more for the future than the present.
As things worked out around the league, had the Dolphins beaten the Texans on Sunday, it would have put them in an excellent playoff position heading into the final game. Now, while still somehow mathematically alive, they must count on a unlikely sequence of events from several games next weekend to have a chance. Is it possible? Sure. Is it realistic? Hardly.
The bigger questions to pose today is this: How could the Dolphins look so terrible in the first half of that game? How could there be so many missed tackles, so many dropped passes, so many forgettable moments?
"No excuses," said Coach Tony Sparano. "This wasn't the kind of game we wanted to play."
The missed tackles? There must have been a half-dozen in the first half alone. You would think in the 15th game of the season the players would be fundamentally better than that. There is no need pointing fingers at one player. There were too many culprits for that.
The dropped passes? Davone Bess let one slip away. Ricky Williams had one bounce off his hands - both hands - and the result was a costly interception. But this problem wasn't only limited to the offense. Safety Gibril Wilson dropped an oh-so-easy interception in the second half that left you wondering how he could have possibly failed to catch it.
There were some games this year the Dolphins had in their hands and let slip away, just like those passes. But on this day, you can't point to one pivotal moment and you really can't make much of a case that a second-half comeback looked promising. The final deficit was deceiving. The Dolphins lost this game in a first half that was as sorry a performance as I can remember seeing in a long time.
Forget about the playoff possibilities, the realistic goal of this franchise should be to be in a position a year from now where they are sitting comfortably in December instead of squirming in their seats.
The needs are clearly defined, so clear that the guy in Section 400 is probably on the same page as General Manager Jeff Ireland.
The Dolphins need more punch on offense in the form a big-play receiver and tight end. They need a kick returner because Ted Ginn Jr. obviously isn't the answer. They need another nose tackle, a play-making linebacker and one or two safeties.
You can put the need for a safety right up there with the need for a receiver. How many times this season were the Dolphins torched by deep passes? Sure, the rookie cornerbacks deserve their share of the blame. But, in fairness to them, they received very little help from the players behind them.
All of these personnel deficits were apparent in most every game, but certainly in the loss to the Texans. On the other side of the field, you saw All-Pro receiver Andre Johnson. Though his numbers were pedestrian, just having him out there opened things up for the other receivers. It's hard to find an Andre Johnson, but the Dolphins must exhaust every avenue possible.
The safeties just weren't making plays in the first half. When Houston's Matt Schaub throws for 247 yards before halftime, you know there are some significant breakdowns.
It is easy to make excuses for a 7-8 record. The schedule was the toughest in the league. The injuries were significant and you can build a case for so many of them being impossible to overcome, from running backs Ronnie Brown and Patrick Cobbs to nose tackle Jason Ferguson to cornerback Will Allen.
I also wonder how the path of this team might have been different if Chad Pennington had stayed healthy. Not that it wasn't good to see a large dose of Chad Henne for much of the season. But Pennington had so many believers in that locker room, his loss had to have an impact.
As you evaluate this roster, know this: While the needs are clear, the holes aren't nearly as abundant as they were when this new regime took over following the 1-15 season of 2007. The Dolphins have a lot of the answers in place, and it is possible only one more draft and free agency period is needed to rectify the remaining deficiencies. That's one of the reasons the next six months promise to be enticing.
These Dolphins are really not that far away.
The season will, in all likelihood, end for the Dolphins next Sunday against the Steelers at Land Shark Stadium. They will surely look back and wonder what might have been, and of all the questions they will ask, the reason for that first-half collapse against Houston deserves to reside high on that list.
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