MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Here’s hoping this grand experiment of Mike McDaniel works, and not just to show there’s another way of leading a football team besides the drill-sergeant dinosaur from an antiquated time before players painted fingernails and got pedicures.
It’s also because football sounds fun with the new Miami Dolphins coach. That’s a word you rarely hear around football. Fun. And it’s said with the understanding no one knows if McDaniel can be a successful head coach.
We don’t know whether he can call plays, much less command a room, corral a team that’s lost three straight games or handle the, “five things that come across your desk every day that have nothing to do with football,’’ as Nick Saban put one of his roles.
Here’s what we know: Players like McDaniel. That’s a start. You’re not going to get any player to admit to disliking their boss, of course. But the Dolphins players do something odd for pro football players when discussing their coach.
They smile. They can’t help it. Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa even admitted to calling him, “Mystic Mike.” Why?
“Just like Conor McGregor, this dude, he loves to predict stuff,” Tagovailoa said.
The Dude. That sounds right for McDaniel. It’s straight out of Jeff Bridges’ anti-establishment character in “The Big Lebowski.”
There is an opposite quality to McDaniel in comparison to his scowling Dolphins predecessor, Brian Flores. But let’s not overdo that. Flores could coach. And Tagavailoa speaks for most teammates in saying every previous coach on his timeline was, “hard on me,’’ he said.
His dad. His high school coach. Alabama coach Nick Saban. Flores. All of were dictator coaches.
“Mike is a little different,’’ Tagovailoa said. “Mike is always trying to encourage you and trying to keep you going, so for me it’s a little backwards. I’m used to being hard on myself and the coach getting hard on myself and he’s trying to tell me, ‘Hey, it’s going to be OK. We’re only in May, only in June.’ ‘’
That’s because it is only May, and now June, and let’s not pretend it’s not by over-reaching on these plays. What’s important here is McDaniel and Tagovailoa are married beyond the manner of most coaches and quarterbacks.
For as much as this team’s re-done narrative this offseason is how McDaniel is new-age wizard and Tua is The Man, capital letters, let’s remember team owner Steve Ross’ grand plan had Sean Payton as coach right now and Tom Brady as quarterback.
You’d have needed security guards at the ticket line if they’d hired them — meaning, as it played out, if Flores hadn’t filed his lawsuit against the league involving Ross. That ended that idea.
So it’s McDaniel as the latest coach to usher this team into a fresh era where leaders don’t have to bark and bite. The reigning Super Bowl coach, Sean McVay, is known for being lighthearted at times, tweeting this past draft when New England picked guard Cole Strange, “How about that? We wasted our time watching him, thinking he’d be at 104.”
The previous champion coach, Tampa Bay’s Bruce Arians, was known for a cocktail hour after games with players and a winning motto of, “No risk it, no biscuit.”
There are a dozen ways up the mountain, but there’s something to be said for the medieval mindset dominating football from Vine Lombardi to Bill Belichick sinking into the tar pit. Will McDaniel be a successful part of the revolution? Or an example, as old-school Bill Parcells once said, “Clowns can’t coach.”
No, McDaniel is no clown. His minicamps look like normal minicamps. He sounds for the most part like a coach. Sure, what’s to come will shake traditionalists. Expect veterans to sit out preseason games. As in all of them, for some of the veterans.
Also expect McDaniel to out-positive anyone with an upbeat drumbeat regarding Tagovailoa. This is in stark contrast to Flores’ tough-love manner — and Saban’s at Alabama, too.
“So you’re saying that was a good, deep ball today?” McDaniel said to reporters after Tua’s completion to Tyreek Hill late in Thursday’s practice.
He then detailed how a quarterback can only throw deep if the offensive line provides the time. That was one problem last year.
“Put it on social media,’’ Tagovailoa said of the pass, cupping his arms like a receiver and looking over his shoulder as if to catch a perfectly thrown pass.
It was a meaningful pass to the re-invented narrative of Tua, if not meaningful by NFL standards. McDaniel sounds like he’s breaking through with Tua, who he says is, “opening up.”
“He’s let his guard down, and we’ve been able to keep his confidence high, which it should be right now for sure, while correcting and getting his game better, which is the ultimate goal for everyone,’’ he said.
McDaniel, as he said, is living his boyhood dream by being a NFL coach.
“It’s a fun place to go to work,’’ he said.
Football keeps emerging from its caveman culture, little by little. The Dude is different. There’s no question about that. The question is what it always is: Can he win?
