"On Sundays, NFL teams play the game, and they play to win the game—the Raiders and Chargers proved that to us Sunday night. But on every other day of the week, NFL teams—and coaches especially—don’t play the game; they play the Game. The Game is one of politics, of connections and networks, of knowing the right guy, and of knowing the guy who knows the right guy, and wondering how his son’s college baseball career is going—he’s at Brown, right? To play the Game, you don’t scheme and scout and coach; you glad-hand and schmooze. You scramble for job security, for upward mobility, for increased power..."
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2022/1/10/22876955/brian-flores-fired-miami-dolphins-stephen-ross
Very good read from start to finish, and I completely agree with the author. Flores didn't play the game within the game.
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Maybe, like most Patriots, the problems he has maintaining relationships is a him problem and not an everybody else problem.Tin Indian, Unlucky 13, KeyFin and 1 other person like this. -
I think Flores is a good HC, but not great. And I also disagree with the author that he overachieved (agree with texanphinatic here). You should expect a franchise HC to make the playoffs by year 3. With the new playoff format that means being 57th percentile (43.75% of teams make the playoffs). Making the playoffs is not a huge accomplishment in a 3-year period, and Flores failed at that.
Anyway it is what it is. I wanted Flores for one more year, but he didn't overachieve by any means.Dorfdad, Pauly, ExplosionsInDaSky and 2 others like this. -
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And this is why Miami is a bottom dweller . Instead of listening to the Hc who preferred Herbert over Tua, we listen to the owner who had interest in Herbert. If that doesn’t prove that Ross is a complete moron, I don’t know what does.
dolphin25 likes this. -
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Channel the energy you had following the Buffalo beat down of 2020.
Now throw on the flaming mess of the music city meltdown in 2021.
Pour on 3 straight years of the team being completely unprepared out of camp and falling flat on their face to start the season.
Then ignite it all with the offense being a hopeless, rudderless, disaster during his entire tenure.
Add it up and Flores went down in Flames!!
Firing is justified and not surprising.
And that doesn’t even factor in the subjective art of ‘playing the game’. (i.e. being a nice and pleasurable person to work with)
Were people really fooled by a 7 game stretch against opponents who were mostly laughable.Tin Indian, GARDENHEAD and texanphinatic like this. -
The_Dark_Knight likes this.
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I think you need to view it both in a vacuum and then part of the whole. Did firing Flores make sense? Is it defensible? Yes.
Why? In large part because, while players didn't necessarily give up, there was significant strife on the team between the HC and the FO, players and especially his own staff. Add in what you mention as the specific triggers and it's easy to see why we are moving on.
Why are we keeping Grier? That's a tougher question, especially if reports that Ross didn't "choose" between them are true. He seems to trust and like Grier, which could be good or bad. Certainly the knee jerk reaction is that it's all bad. I tend to agree at this point, I wanted him gone ... but if we hire a good coach (calling Doug Pederson!) and revamp some of the FO (like whoever the eff does OL scouting/eval) then I'll be somewhat placated.Tin Indian and Pennington's Limp Arm like this. -
I guess he can say he knocked it out of the park with Waddle, Phillips and Holland in the draft last year.
But ultimately I take them at their word.
I think it came down to Grier is likely a great person to work with. Has good relationships with everyone. Because he has probably shown a willingness to compromise with others opinions. Learn from his mistakes.
Things Flores probably didn’t seem capable of in the eyes of the front office.
You can call it playing the games I guess. Or you call it standard traits employers look for and a good basis of being a team player.GARDENHEAD and texanphinatic like this. -
Tin Indian, Pauly and Pennington's Limp Arm like this.
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This dude literally just blew (no pun intended) the two highest draft capitals in Dolphins history, in a row, and retains a job. The guy that goes 9-8 and 10-6 gets canned, with, according to other posters on here (i'll take their word for it) a QB he didn't even want to work with.
So Flores had the right QB in mind, Flores has back to back winning seasons for Miami (unheard of in its own right these days) and we 'can his ***?' Yep, if the Jets hire this guy he is destined to put Miami back in the basement, likely where they belong.
I sure hope Ross/Grier don't leak any x-rated videos. -
https://www.miamiherald.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/barry-jackson/article256840502.html
The players liked FLO. So, if these reports are true, that makes the sum of this mess easy to ascertain. Management is trash. And like the OP says, it's politics. It's Grier licking balls and a billionaire liking it (or vice versa on that, I'm not into that sort of stuff, won't even pretend to be an expert) -
A failure to be able to relate other human beings in a non-disagreeable way is failure of leadership. I’m not saying you have to be all Mr Rogers all the time. Look at Gordon Ramsey, he spends far more time in each show encouraging and setting expectations than he does blowing his top.Pennington's Limp Arm and Dol-Fan Dupree like this. -
The problem with this organization is there are too many politics and not enough football guys at the top of the organization. Grier is not a football guy, he is a mediocre scout who is great at smooching and playing internal politics to climb the corporate ladder, but in terms of football knowledge he has little of it and Ross is none the wiser.mlb1399 likes this. -
If the guy is a flat out jerk to everyone around him and carrying himself with a holier than thou attitude and on top of it cant get half of his job right, you aren't going to last long. Ross's statement is pretty clear on this - it wasn't a performance issue it was pretty much he couldn't get along with anyone. It seems he and Grier having a falling out was the last domino to fall. I was disappointed yesterday when they let him go but I've been hearing for weeks that there were problems in regards to how Flores was working with people. The team was flat every year out of camp and looked woefully unprepared, He couldn't win a big game and usually got blasted in them, his inability to hire a competent offensive staff - well you throw that on top of everything else and you are writing your own ticket out the door.
Pauly, GARDENHEAD and Pennington's Limp Arm like this. -
The lack of offensive coaches is also on Grier for undermining Gailey last year to force in Tua. After that not many coaches wanted to come here. Grier also did not want to pay big money for a good oline coach, so we got stuck with a noob oline coach and co off. Coordinators. Flores was just trying to make the best of the **** sandwich Grier gave him to work with, and he did a damn pretty good job of that by ending up with back to back winning seasons.
The problem with this team was not Flores, the problem with this team is the incompetence and internal politics at the top of the organization, mainly Grier and Ross.Hooligan, M1NDCRlME, mlb1399 and 1 other person like this. -
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mlb1399 likes this.
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He made a lot of mistakes and didn't seem willing to work on his mistakes or he believed it wasn't him.
I remember when Holmgren was hired by Seattle. He had over 40 titles and wanted to control everything. He started to have more and more success in Seattle as he reliquished more and more control. The owner had a similar meeting and he was willing to give up more control rather than get fired.
Flores is a good coach. He let his ego get away. Hopefully he learns from this. And when he does I hope it is in the NFC.Tin Indian likes this. -
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Is it possible that Flores orchestrate his firing? This season started with Deshaun Watson making unprecedented demand for how a team hired a GM and coach. After the Ravens game, I felt the Flo achieve his goal for the defense (with the help of 2 rookies) and blamed him for the first time for how poorly the offense has developed. Perhaps, he came to a similar conclusion during this season and force his way off the team. Multiple defensive coaches have found success by becoming the coach of a team with a franchise QB, including his mentor, Belichick. When BB quit the Jets, they thought they had Super Bowl caliber team until Vinny was injured. By switching Patriots, Belichick had his franchise QB, Bledsoe, until Mo Lewis changed history.
Perhaps fortunately for the Dolphins, they were able to move immediately as the lateness of Belichick's move hampered the Jets for years. It's a bit ironic that Ross and Grier come off as a bit ruthless at this time, but isn't that a quality that we credited Flores when we made early staff and personnel changes. -
Sorry but Grier and Ross have given me 0 reason to trust either of them so just going to have to stick with what is known/certain. -
He's outlasted 4 or 5 GM's by knowing how to stay just below the radar on stuff like that. Flores has no experience there since he's not playing politics...he's just coaching. -
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I don’t trust anything coming out of our FO. They just fired our most successful coach in decades(albeit the bar is really low). Are they stirring up s***, is all of it true, some of it? Very hard to say. In 21+ of business one thing is for certain, whenever there’s a high profile firing/letting go, there’s a lot of spin/propaganda to follow it.dolphin25 likes this. -
dolphin25 likes this.
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It's not that he's just too busy focused on being a coach, or that he's not playing politics, it's that they (the NE guys) are playing a different brand of politics that doesn't fly outside of New England where BB rules with an iron fist. They all want to be him but they don't have the cache for it and it bites them in the butt every time. It bites them with fans and media, players, staff, front offices and eventually ownership. -
I agree that all sorts of propaganda comes out after the fact and it is best to keep a filter on to sort it out. That said over the last 2 months of the season there was a lot of talk about things were not as rosey as it seemed so when I hear this stuff it matches up to that pretty closely. I do suggest Barry's article it brings up a lot of different things and at the end of it he still feels it was a mistake to let him go, so that is not your typical hit piece. -
So what we're really saying here is that your first time head coach was inexperienced at everything involved in the role? Well; I'm just shocked by this new. :rolleyes:
Here's the only game I care about and the only game winning coaches need to care about; the game on Sundays. **** the game within the game of playing the politics of the organization; the coaching network of his peers is important no doubt about that and he's obviously failed there. However if the root cause of this firing is due to his failing to play the game properly within the building then guess what; we've got far bigger problems than a head coach. We've all already known that though.
Stephen Ross shouldn't own a football team and shouldn't be putting his everlasting faith and trust into a GM; an employee of the team throughout it's last 20 years of mediocrity. I'm curious what the other "advisors" think here; mainly Dan Marino.
Fire a coach because he rubs some people the wrong way; we're all so damn soft now it's sad. If I got fired everytime I disagreed with a co-worker or rubbed someone the wrong way I'd have nowhere to work. Fact of the matter is if he's just that way as a human; then yeah he's not going to fit in a productive environment. If he's hard on people and demanding and rubbing people the wrong way based around building success and a winning culture and wiping out the loser mentality that exists in this organization then guess what... that's EXACTLY why you hired him away from New England; to build the winning culture here. But Chris the snake Grier goes crying over his precious QB pick knowing his employment likely is tied to him and all of the sudden all of that goes out the window again for the loser mentality we've known for years. Awesome...dolphin25 likes this.