The Dolphin
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- Mar 19, 2019
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The Dolphins weren’t very good this year, even if they were better than most thought they’d be.
But owner Stephen Ross insisted they weren’t trying to be bad on purpose — despite the fact that nearly every move they made last offseason suggested it.
“The idea that we made decisions to try to be bad on purpose is ridiculous,” he said in a statement on the team website, via Adam Beasley of the Miami Herald. “We were a team with an aging roster and the most dead salary cap money in the NFL,” Ross continued. “So we knew that we needed to build it from the ground up, and that’s what drove the decisions.”
On the other hand, the Dolphins did have the league’s lowest payroll, got rid of plenty of veteran players, and traded away two of their best ones to Houston just before the start of the season (and another to Pittsburgh during the season), so it may be a matter of semantics and your own perspective.
“There were a lot of narratives this year about our approach that were incorrect,” Ross said. “We objectively looked at things and determined that we were a long way from being a championship caliber team and we needed to take a different approach.”
They won five of their last nine to get all the way to 5-11, showing some signs of competence along the way, and they’ll pick fifth in the 2020 NFL Draft. That’s not high enough to guarantee the franchise-changing quarterback everyone assumes is the target in such cases (though it might still be high enough to get them a recovering-from-injury Tua Tagovailoa).
They also have a whopping 14 picks in this year’s draft, including five in the top 60.