Things could not have gone worse for the Miami Dolphins in their 33-8 loss to the Indianapolis Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium.
Tua Tagovailoa threw two interceptions and was benched late for Zach Wilson, and the defense was lit up for 418 total yards. Nearly every area of needed improvement from last season saw none.
Sure, it's a one-game sample size, and "Any Given Sunday" and all that jazz. But Miami looked like a mess in what was supposed to be one of the easiest games on its schedule. On both sides of the ball.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, CBS Sports’ Cody Benjamin believes Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel and his entire operation could be on the chopping block after Miami’s defense made Colts quarterback Daniel Jones look like “the second coming of Peyton Manning.”
“We expected a bit of a downturn from Miami, but making Daniel Jones look like the second coming of Peyton Manning? Yikes. It's only one game, but it feels safe to suggest their whole operation is squarely on the hot seat now. Needing a strong start to regain confidence in Miami, Tua Tagovailoa was most concerning of all, losing the ball on one drive after another,” Benjamin wrote.
McDaniel refused to condemn Tagovailoa and blamed the rest of the locker room postgame in a move that’s sure to rally the troops.
“It was something left to be desired ... there's throws he makes nine times out of 10, and he didn't make them today,” McDaniel said, per ESPN. “Definitely not all on him -- too many people failed at the execution of their jobs for him to have anything extra on his shoulders.
“Like the rest of the team, (his performance) wasn't good enough.”
Tagovailoa also took little accountability afterwards, taking particular offense to one reporter’s idea that he turns the ball over “in bunches.”
“This was the lack of a lot of things today. We don't want to overreact, and we don't want to underreact -- we want to make sure we get this right so that this never happens again,” Tagovailoa said.
“I wouldn't say I'm pressing. I would say it's part of the game. You obviously don't want to turn the ball over. I thought that was a wild comment, that I turn the ball over in bunches. That's crazy. It just so happened that's what happened today, it was what it was. Got to move forward from that, can't make those same mistakes.”
Getting rid of Tagovailoa and McDaneil before the end of the season is less likely than during it, but it's likely the two would be a package deal in any situation. They can win their way out of this hole, or they can continue sinking to the bottom together.
This isn’t typically what a winning team acts like at the beginning of the season. We’ll see if the Dolphins are a special case this fall.