I'm tired of hearing "experts" on TV saying that if you stop the Wildcat, you stop the Dolphins. The analysts act as if our main rushing attack is the Wildcat. I've even heard it stated that our success paasing last year was skewed by the Wildcat stats. To me, this proves that none of the TV experts watch any of the games, or even do research of any kind before opening their mouths. I decided to compile a database of each Wildcat play because I couldn't find a site that separated out the Wildcat into its own category. What I did was, I went through each game play-by-play and marked down the following statistics... Total Plays Total Runs Wildcat Runs Wildcat Passes Wildcat TDs Total Yards Wildcat Yards Yardage gained on each carry, and who carried it All of this information is stored in an Excel spreadsheet. Each week of the 2008 season has its own sheet, as displayed below. After accumulating all of the stats from the entire season. I made another sheet and crunched the numbers for the entire season. The results are shown below. As you can see, we only used the Wildcat 8.82% of the time. It accounted for 17% of our rushes, and 9.97% of our total yards gained offensively on the season. So I say to all the critics....if you stop the Wildcat, you've done 10% of your job. You better be ready for the other 90% of Dolphins football. If you want a copy of the entire spreadsheet, you can download it with this link....http://www.4shared.com/file/139963491/c3bfdee6/Wildcat_Game_Log.html I'll be compiling the 2009 edition very soon.
stopping 10% of an offense is kind of a big deal, though. it doesn't sound like much, but it's a very important element. especially when that 10% average nearly 7 yards per play. that WILL make a big impact.
Ok, lets break it down. Of the 15 games we used the Wildcat, here's how we did, using the 10% mark as the deciding factor. Less than 10% of our total yards: Week 7 - BAL - 1.11% - Loss Week 8 - BUF - 9.5% - Win Week 9 - DEN - (-1.47%) - Win Week 12 - NE - 6.38% - Loss Week 13 - STL - 1.48% - Win Week 14 - BUF - 1.69% - Win Week 15 - SF - 6.45% - Win WILDCARD - BAL - 2.54% - Loss TOTAL 5-3 More than 10% of our total yards: Week 3 - NE - 25.81% - Win Week 5 - SD - 12.31% - Win Week 6 - HOU - 20.81% - Loss Week 10 - SEA - 22.16% - Win Week 11 - OAK - 13.61% - Win Week 16 - KC - 14.14% - Win Week 17 - NYJ - 17.24% - Win TOTAL 6-1 So does stopping the wildcat (or not using it) have a direct impact whether we win? I don't think so. We won 5 games where the wildcat had very little impact. Baltimore accounted for 2 of our 3 losses where the wildcat was less than 10% of our offense. But wildcat or not, Baltimore was going to shut us down. The wildcat was just one of many things we could not do against them. Our other loss came at the hands of the Patriots. Their way of stopping the wildcat was to make the game a shootout. However, they couldn't stop our base offense. I don't think it's accurate to say we live and die by the wildcat. Claiming that we "have to trick our opponents" to win, is an ignorant comment. No one calls Peyton Manning cheap, gimmicky, or disrespectful for using playaction and audibles to confuse the defense. Manning is actually highly respected for doing that. But for some reason, the public perception around Miami is that we used tricks to win, and that isn't worthy of respect. And I say just Miami because the media seems to be drooling over the Eagles opportunities to use the wildcat. Long live the truth!