I haven’t watched a single preseason NFL game this year. Normally that would feel strange for me, but this season feels different. I already know Miami could be in for a long year, and for once I’m not going into September trying to convince myself that a few new pieces have suddenly turned the Dolphins into a Super Bowl contender.
I’ve followed this team for most of my life, long enough to see plenty of promising starts, expensive fixes and new beginnings that never quite became what we hoped they would. Maybe that history is exactly why I’m more interested this year in what Miami is trying to build than I am in what its record looks like in December.
For years, the Dolphins have seemed to chase the finished product before putting enough underneath it to make it last. Bring in the big name. Find the missing piece. Change the coach. Draft another quarterback. None of those moves are necessarily wrong, but great players can only carry a shaky foundation so far.
That is why this rebuild has my attention.
Dolphins coach Jeff Hafley has made it clear that success this season won’t be defined by wins alone. He has talked about development, building the foundation the right way and refusing to take shortcuts.
I know some fans hear that and immediately think excuses are being made before the season even begins.
I heard something else.
I heard honesty.
If this really is a rebuild, then rebuild it. Don’t slap some expensive paint over the cracks and tell us the house is ready.
Miami already has a few players who look like legitimate pieces of that foundation. De’Von Achane is one of the most dangerous players in football when the ball is in his hands, and Jordyn Brooks has shown he can be an important part of this defense. There may be others, and I hope there are, but some players I might have confidently called building blocks a year ago didn’t have the seasons I expected.
Maybe that wasn’t entirely their fault. Coaching matters. Injuries matter. The players around you matter. Football is rarely as simple as looking at one player’s numbers and deciding whether he can or can’t play.
So until some of those questions are answered, I reserve my right to be cautiously optimistic.
Then we get to Malik Willis.
And this one interests me.
My concern with Willis has never been that he doesn’t have talent. The talent is obvious. ESPN pointed out that over the last two seasons, among quarterbacks with at least 100 dropbacks, Willis had the highest explosive-pass rate in the NFL at 17.4% and the highest scramble rate at 13.0%.
Those numbers should get your attention.
They tell us Willis can create something when a play breaks down. He can hurt a defense with his arm, escape with his legs and turn a play that looks dead into the kind of play that reminds you why football is fun to watch.
But there is another side to that argument.
A lot of what we saw from Willis happened in Green Bay, with Matt LaFleur calling plays and a stronger supporting cast around him. That matters. Good coaching and good players can hide weaknesses and make a quarterback’s job a whole lot easier.
Miami may not be able to give him that same cushion.
So I have questions.
Can he do it consistently? Can he make the routine throws along with the spectacular ones? Can he stand in there on third-and-eight when everybody in the stadium knows he has to throw? Can he lead an offense when he is no longer the interesting backup stepping into somebody else’s machine?
I don’t know.
And that’s okay.
The jury is still out, and I’m willing to let the evidence come in before I make up my mind.
I’m not ready to crown Malik Willis as Miami’s next great quarterback, and I’m certainly not ready to run him out of town before he has had a real chance to show us what he can do.
He’s wearing aqua and orange now, so he gets my support.
What I don’t want to see is Dolphins fans treating every Sunday like a final verdict on whether this rebuild has succeeded or failed. I understand the frustration. We’ve all watched this team chase answers before, and patience gets harder every time a new beginning starts to look suspiciously like the last one.
But a real rebuild is not supposed to look pretty from the beginning.
Young players make mistakes. Some players you believe in will disappoint you. Somebody nobody is talking about in September may look like part of the future by December. Coaches will learn who can play, who can’t and who deserves another year.
There will probably be Sundays when I yell at the television and wonder why I ever talked myself into being patient.
That’s part of being a Dolphins fan.
But this year I want to look at something besides the final score.
Does this team look better in January than it did in September? Are the young players developing? Is Malik Willis improving? Are draft picks becoming starters instead of disappearing from the roster? Is the defense finding an identity? When somebody makes a mistake, does he make the same one three weeks later, or does he learn from it?
Those things matter when you are trying to build something that lasts.
So to my fellow Dolphins fans, I’m not asking you to stop caring about wins. I certainly won’t. I’m not asking anybody to give this new regime a free pass either. If the coaching is bad, say it’s bad. If the decisions don’t make sense, question them.
I’m only asking that we give this thing enough breathing room to find out what it actually is.
Watch the young players. Watch them struggle. Watch them learn. Hopefully, watch a few of them turn into players we’ll be talking about years from now.
And watch Malik Willis.
Maybe those flashes of explosive football are showing us what he can become. Maybe Green Bay made him look better than he really is. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
We’re finally going to find out.
I can handle a difficult season if I can see where the team is going. What I’m tired of is watching Miami start over without ever seeming to build anything that lasts.
So build it.
Build it right.
And give us something worth believing in again.
By J Jones