There’s enough brainpower on the offensive side for Mike McDaniel to focus on being a head coach.
The Miami Dolphins will roll into the offseason with a ton of questions and only a few answers at the moment. They have a lot on their plate with personnel, the coaching carousel, and an overall culture change.
One of the problems on the offensive side is playcalling. It’s a full-time job usually held by the offensive coordinator and isn’t something head coaches should be doing on top of their other duties. In the case of Mike McDaniel, it’s impacted the team’s discipline.
Whether it’s penalties on the field or players being late to meetings and practice, it’s an aspect that is directly impacted by the head coach, and he has fallen short of that.
That’s not the only issue. Maybe the bigger one is that McDaniel is just not a great playcaller. As a play designer, he’s among the elite in the NFL, but calling the right play at the right time and setting defenses up to be exploited by calls later is something he hasn’t demonstrated he can do consistently.
Not only that, he doesn’t get the play calls in fast enough for quarterback Tua Tagovailoa to diagnose what the defense is showing. He plays off of trust in the play, and everyone has seen how the “blind trust” has backfired.
It’s been three years, and it hasn’t gotten much better, but the Dolphins recently made a move that can remedy the situation.
In Bobby Slowik We Trust
The Dolphins brought in Bobby Slowik as the senior pass game coordinator, reuniting him with Mike McDaniel from their time in San Francisco, and funny enough, his brother, Ryan Slowik, is the Dolphins defensive backs coach.
Slokwik is most known as the offensive coordinator for Houston Texans in the last two years and was a big part of CJ Stroud’s early success. He runs a similar style of offense as McDaniel and will fit right in quickly.
With Slowik, Frank Smith, and Darrell Bevell all in-house, there’s more than enough brainpower for McDaniel to give up play-calling duties and still be the de facto play designer. Slowik’s recent success with Houston should make him the first option if McDaniel chooses that route.
Copycat League
We have a similar case study with the Philadelphia Eagles. Head coach Nick Sirianni lost offensive coordinator Shane Steichen to a head coaching gig with the Indianapolis Colts a few years ago and took over as the play caller last year.
The offense wasn’t the same, and although they entered the playoffs with a good record, they took a first-round loss, with most of the blame coming from the offense.
This year, Sirianni hired Kellen Moore as the new coordinator and play caller and became more of a “CEO head coach.” The Eagles offense had some ups and downs throughout the year, but all came together in the playoffs, and they rolled everyone in front of them to a Super Bowl.
I’m not saying the play-caller switch was the reason the Eagles won the Super Bowl, but it was one of the reasons. When a head coach delegates a full-time responsibility to a trustworthy person, it frees them up to do the things that head coaches are there to do, and that is to run the team, not just the offense.
With Bobby Slowik in-house, it’s time for Mike McDaniel to take a step back and give up play-calling duties not only to someone more equipped to do it but to focus more on his first job of keeping everyone accountable and focusing on the whole team.
Let us know in the comments if you want Mike McDaniel to give up play-calling duties and to who out of the three candidates in-house.