Dolphins head coach Joe Philbin looked kind of dumb for refusing to name a starting quarterback last week. After thrashing the Raiders behind one of Ryan Tannehill's best outings of his career, maybe there was a method to Philbin's madness after all.
After the Dolphins lost a dreadful mess of a game to the Chiefs in Week 3, head coach Joe Philbin came out and refused to name quarterback Ryan Tannehill the starter for the next game. It was a curious thing to do on many levels. Philbin did nothing to give the team or any outside observer reason to believe that anybody other than Tannehill would be the starting quarterback last week against the Raiders in London. In fact, backup quarterback Matt Moore said nothing had changed when it came to first team reps during the week of practice for Tannehill.
The whole thing came across as a threat with no bite to it. Was Philbin seriously contemplating a quarterback change? Why wasn't he preparing Moore to start then? The situation became so absurd that Tannehill named himself the starter in front of the media while his head coach refused to do so.
I piled on Philbin like nobody's business in the wake of that foolishness, so did everyone else.
I have never been a Tannehill fan, and I wouldn't have been all that shocked if had he been benched. But this ... this just looked and sounded like silly talk pushed by a man who may well have lost the respect of his team. As I said on the radio last week, can you imagine a quarterback having played at such an average level as Tannehill getting up and telling the media that he was the starter if someone like Bill Parcells or Tony Dungy been the coach in that situation?
Of course not.
After all that, the Dolphins win against the Raiders last Sunday might have decided a head football coach's fate. It turns out I was right about somebody getting fired, but I was wrong about which head coach would get a pink slip.
Maybe we were all wrong about whether or not Philbin's motivational ploy worked. After Tannehill missed Dolphins Brian Hartline on a corner route that would would have given them a first-and-goal inside Oakland's 10-yard line on Miami's first drive, the quarterback reeled off 14 straight completions. Those 14 completions included a 13-yard touchdown pass to Mike Wallace on a screen and an 18-yard touchdown to Dion Sims on a corner route. The Dolphins added a Lamar Miller nine-yard touchdown run in the second quarter for a 24-7 lead at the half. It was the best half I've ever seen Tannehill play.
He cooled off a bit in the second half, and eventually threw an interception off a pass that was maybe a little bit behind Sims, who still should have caught it, but the damage was done. The halftime deficit was so steep that it forced the Raiders to open up their offense. That played right in to what the Dolphins defense does best, rush passer and defend the pass. Miami ended up with three second half interceptions which led to a Lamar Miller touchdown run and cornerback Cortland Finnegan scoring after he scooped up an errant shotgun snap by the Raiders.
The Dolphins headed back to the states having stomped a mud hole into the Raiders, a final score of 38-14. Tannehill finally looked like the franchise quarterback they drafted him to be. And you know what? Philbin comes back looking a helluva lot smarter than when he got on the plane to leave.
At the end of the day, we all might need to give the man some benefit of the doubt going forward.
from SBNation.com - All Posts http://ift.tt/1vy4UTY
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