MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — The Miami Dolphins‘ locker room was a shell-shocked place in the hour following their meltdown loss to the Tennessee Titans.
Answers were few and far between for how a defense that was No. 1 in EPA league-wide between Weeks 8 and 13 could give up two long touchdown drives in the game’s final five minutes to lose at home for the first time since last December. (The final score? 28-27 Titans.)
But the short version, based on their words and our observations, is that the Dolphins stopped running before they hit the tape, had players in new positions struggling to execute their assignment, and had some of their biggest stars play their worst at the worst possible time.
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At the top, let’s agree with Mike McDaniel, who said in his postgame press conference that “it was a legitimate team loss. I think everybody had their hand in it.”
Special teams had a field goal blocked. The offense scored just 20 points on Miami’s five drives that traveled inside the Titans’ 5 and also went three-and-out on a crucial late fourth-quarter possession when a first down likely would have ended it.
But despite all those caveats, if you spot a Vic Fangio defense with a 14-point lead with 4:34 left to play, you expect to win.
Why? Because the last 767 times an NFL team has held a 14-point lead with less than three minutes remaining, that team has won.
The Titans snapped that losing streak by going 139 yards in 13 plays in their final two possessions, including their game-winning touchdown drive that covered 64 yards in just 26 seconds — an epic meltdown that made for the worst loss in the McDaniel era.
“A couple communication issues on the back end is what I saw, in terms of specifically the crossing routes,” McDaniel said. “There was one big one to [DeAndre Hopkins] that was pretty hurtful in the overall grand scheme of things.
“But also you could easily say that that situation, the defense with a couple guys that got hurt within the game should have never been in that situation. I know the defense – specifically multiple players and coaches came up to me and let me know their feeling on how the end of the game went, and it’s not acceptable to them, and that’s how you want the team to look at it.”
The Hopkins completion that McDaniel mentioned was a 36-yard catch-and-run, one that is always unacceptable, no matter the defensive call.
Rookie quarterback Will Levis was spectacular down the stretch, completing 9 of 11 passes for 132 yards and a touchdown in the Titans’ late two touchdown drives. And he did it against the likes of Jalen Ramsey and Xavien Howard, who had both been spectacular for the last month.
“We probably let our foot off the gas a little bit,” Dolphins linebacker Bradley Chubb conceded.
Chubb also acknowledged that “when you see a goal [like the 1 seed] ahead of you, cruise control is a natural instinct. You know what I mean? At the end of the day, man, we just got to find ways to not be in that mode at all and attack each and every day, each and every game, each and every play. Like, we want to be champions.”
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Ramsey, meanwhile, insisted that overconfidence was not an issue for the defensive backfield. Rather, he believes miscommunication was the big problem — which is not entirely surprising, considering the Dolphins were down to backups at both safety positions after DeShon Elliott left the game with rib and head injuries. Jevon Holland didn’t play at all due to knee issues.
That left Brandon Jones and Elijah Campbell to keep things together…but they couldn’t.
“We did have a couple of guys down,” said Ramsey, who gave up two catches for 58 Monday, per Next Gen Stats. “I don’t like to use excuses, but when you don’t get to practice with certain guys that, that hurts a little bit sometimes. But regardless, it’s just football man and we got to figure out a way to play better in those moments.”
Meanwhile, Xavien Howard surrendered six catches for 129 yards on 11 targets Monday night. Put another way, the Dolphins’ two star corners had their worst game of the season on the same night.
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