Stephen Ross wasted no time giving his head coach a vote of confidence for the 2025 season, but he might wish he hadn’t jumped so quickly.
When a coach has to answer questions about the discipline of his team, he doesn’t have their respect. Mike McDaniel does not have the respect of all of his players, and in his postseason interview with the media, he all but confirmed it openly.
Coaches like Andy Reid, John Harbaugh, and Sean Payton never have to answer questions about their team’s discipline. Good coaches who demand respect don’t have to do that. Coaches who want to be friends with their team do. McDaniel is that kind of coach.
Earlier in the 2024 season, former Dolphins safety DeShon Elliott spoke on a podcast about how bad the team was. He cited players who would go to clubs during game week; he talked about them being soft, and he said they lacked discipline. He was railed for his comments despite almost everyone believing them to be true.
“You can just tell, the Miami culture is a reason why Miami will never be good. Miami will never be a good football team,” said Elliott. “Last year, I played for a team that was soft as f—.”
Mike McDaniel’s comments about discipline paint a concerning picture for Dolphins
McDaniel had to answer questions about it, and his responses were not exactly those of someone who has control over his team. In fact, reality would indicate that while he didn’t come out and say, “I don’t have control over my players,” he didn’t actually have to. McDaniel said that some players had multiple fines for disciplinary reasons and that he has to change his approach. In other words, he just admitted he has no control over his team.
“I’m going to adjust my process and make sure that it’s team-wide knowledge any time that things are done that aren’t in the best interest of winning football games,” said McDaniel.
“So there’s a bunch of different reasons and one thing I did learn during the course of the season is that fining guys, which I’d been a part of for season after season in the National Football League, fining guys didn’t particularly move the needle in the way we need to so I’ll adjust as I should as the head coach.”
Miami allowed the team to create a players-only leadership council; a similar council was formed under Joe Philbin. A year after, all of the players that made up that council were released, then Philbin followed a year after that.
It didn’t work this year, either, but when you have a player like Tyreek Hill on that council, and he removes himself from a game, the message is clearly not being relayed the way the Dolphins were hoping.
It might be too late for McDaniel to earn the respect of the Dolphins players.
While McDaniel pointed out that this was not a team-wide problem, the reality is it doesn’t need to be. When you can’t deter behavior issues with a handful of players, the ones that have no self-discipline, you can’t expect the ones that do to simply follow along with the model.
McDaniel set himself up by trying to be the nice guy to his team. He wants so badly to be a players’ coach, but that isn’t what the team wants or needs. When a leader like Calais Campbell tells the media he joined the Dolphins because he heard training camp was quite easy, that should be a red flag immediately.
McDaniel’s inability to deal with problem players makes him look soft as a head coach, and in many cases, his team plays equally soft. There is a lot of work that needs to be done over the course of the next nine months before the 2025 season begins, and it is hard to imagine McDaniel can turn it around to the point his players listen.
