KANSAS CITY, Mo. — This is not the night to be a kicker or punter.
The Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs are playing “Beyond the Wall” here Saturday night.
The subzero temperatures will make kicking a football feel like kicking a bowling ball.
The 30 mph wind gusts will eat up even the most well-struck ball.
So the kicking game could be decisive — which is a concern for the Dolphins and Danny Crossman, who, according to respected sports writer Rick Gosselin, had the NFL’s second-worst special teams unit in 2023.
Wind is howling pic.twitter.com/kOsTUdEsZx
— Adam Beasley (@AdamHBeasley) January 13, 2024
Miami Dolphins Special Teams Under The Microscope
The Dolphins are playing here Saturday instead of at Hard Rock Stadium Sunday in no small part because Crossman’s unit allowed Deonte Harty to return a fourth-quarter punt 96 yards for a touchdown in Week 18.
As a result, the Dolphins finished the season 28th in punt return coverage (12.2 yards per return) to go along with their last-place kickoff coverage team (30.5).
That’s bad news for Crossman, who needed a good season from his unit to feel great about his job security entering the offseason.
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Crossman is one of the longest-tenured Dolphins coaches, having survived the Mike McDaniel-for-Brian Flores swap in 2019.
But the Dolphins special teams have been bad for some time. Gosselin ranked them 27th in 2022 and 22nd in 2021.
So Crossman, more than perhaps any player or coach, needs to show up Saturday.
When asked this week if the coverage teams have met his standards, Crossman replied:
“My standards are probably disillusioned. You don’t want to give up anything. You look at kickoffs — we’ve given up two long kickoff returns, and we’ve kicked off 100 and something times. Two is too many to me. One is too many.
“The guys are doing a good job, and the plays that we haven’t been able to make, there are reasons. There are coaching points. Some of it is individual where we didn’t do something correctly. Some of it was we were late in doing something. But then again, I always look at myself and blame myself first.
“Why didn’t we trigger fast enough? What were we looking at that didn’t put us in position? So, I always look at myself first. Then it’s look at the players. If it’s the same guys making the same mistakes, then we need to do something different with that.
“But, like I said, we’ve kicked off over 100 times and, in my opinion, have had two negative plays and one play that I would like to have back just because we could have been really good on it. We went into that game doing a pretty good job covering punts. The longest return was 14 yards, then we give up a touchdown. Again, it cost us. And yeah, I’m going to beat myself up a long time for it.”
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