I had never watched or heard McDaniel speak. I was startled by his physical presentation in the post-game presser. I don't know if that is just the way he presents. I got used to it. How to describe it? Hmm, like an actor warming up, just kind of standing there getting loose. I don't know, how would you describe this?
95% of the presser he looked down. Not at the asking pencil, not out in space, down. Very deliberate speaker. Very.
So his physical presentation was odd to me but I don't make nor mean anything more about it than "odd." The substance...That's a brilliant man, there. Philosophical. He asks the biggest of the big questions: "What kind of people are we?" He has a "clean" (his word for the kind of football he wants) mind--clear, organized. Innovative. I have bemoaned as recently as yesterday the small-ball, small-mind West Coast offense that has tiki-taka'd the NFL running game to death and which has made the pro game dink-and-dump boring. There is nothing small about McDaniel's mind or his vision for the "Dolphins" offense. He has made them Big Play fish. "Dolphins" are one of the most explosive teams on both sides of the ball in the league.
So, how to explain that he got outcoached with his QB? Why didn't he see that Tua is "a guy who’s going to anticipate, and he’s going to let the ball go" as his counterpart on the "Packers" bench did. That was the game! As folks on Twitter said Tua wasn't reading the defense in the second half, he was throwing first, reading, and thinking second. It's bizarre that such an intellectual coach who sees the Big Stuff would miss a detail as obvious as the dead-head pattern that emerged in how his QB operated. The Twitterverse was right: Tua was throwing to pre-ordained spots where the receiver was supposed to be rather than looking to see if the motherfucker was actually there. How could such a thing happen? How could it have gestated, as it self-evidently did since Matt LaFleur fucking saw it on tape? McDaniel has seen a lot more of Tua than LaFleur has not to have seen that in that practice was a ticking bomb. The bomb detonated today. I can't explain it and McDaniel's team now has a four-game losing streak and a significantly reduced chance of playing beyond the regular season.
