Over the last four months, I have written about 111 pages of preview notes on each team that the Miami Dolphins will face this year. It’s a labor of love or, perhaps better phrased, one of obsession and hatred of uncertainty. Every year for the past 20 at least, I have seen almost every Dolphins game, and experienced the typically unsatisfying results. Since 2021, I have started getting serious about researching the NFL and teams in order to minimize my pain. Ever the optimist, I am not entering Research Land looking for reasons that the Dolphins might lose; I will set myself up to fail until the day that I am no longer on this Earth. I am less of a dogged data scientist and more of a dogged dog, in the sense that I am a Golden Retriever who was given thumbs and taught to speak and read. I love Ball Team, I chase Ball Team, I read about Ball Team, and now I write about Ball Team, all with enthusiasm and essentially zero frustration. The implication of what this means about my brain is too scary to unpack.
This effort to minimize uncertainty has done a lot for me: it has helped me understand that there is a joy and closeness that comes from trying to know what happens next while removing the sense of control and responsibility that a fan often mistakes as their own. It has lessened the impetus to wear a lucky shirt or go to a lucky bar or make a deal with God or get him to swap our places or keep running up that road or anything like that. Instead, I type and type, get my ideas into a concrete place, and then turn the TV on to see players doing the exact opposite of what I expected. After all, we aren’t in the meeting rooms where Mike McDaniel concocted his deep passing game or where Brandon Staley decided he would press Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle just to see what would happen. Both men did this one week, and then when their teams played a football game, the latter won out. We don’t see how Terron Armstead’s foot is looking this week, we don’t know how players are sleeping (unless you friended Devante Parker on PSN and he never logs off), and we don’t know how deep an understanding the new free agent has of his scheme.
And, if the chaos of real life sounds too obvious, why not dive into how diagnosing who is responsible for what even on a given play is completely impossible? I was cursed with fundamentally incurious football coaches in high school who ran an archaic system that offered prescriptive answers to all problems, and whose understanding when things went awry was that there was a lack of discipline or strength. The system never evolved, quite literally by design. It’s easy to understand why the average football fan is so stupid: they played until their athleticism failed them for the same types of coaches, and they believed that they learned football. Sprinkle in ridiculous pundit conversations (that, yes, affect the supposed Objective Analytics Guys as well) and you have an ecosystem of football fans and media having all sorts of insular conversations about whether Joe Flacco Is Elite, missing the insane confluence of factors that have to come together for even one play on his Super Bowl run.
I don’t mean to suggest from this preface that I am Above It All by any stretch because, even though my poison of choice is the more analytics- and comedy-minded media, I am a consumer of the Shield. And all consumers of the Shield file into the game or sit by their devices on Sundays and just hope that the outcome of 106 players and dozens of coaches (less if you’re the 2022 Patriots who didn’t hire a staff?) involves our half of the mess of folks down there playing and coaching better than the other half. Along the way, stupid unpredictable shit happens (Geno Smith becomes a top 10 QB, future Hall of Famer Kyle Shanahan gambles away a Super Bowl, Justin Herbert hits puberty) and raw numbers accumulate for the analysts to analyze, the fans to weaponize, and provide a sort of head-scratching, non-predictive mess for anyone who wishes to sift through for meaning.
I decided to do some of that sifting before the 2021 season, fresh off a barely-missed Dolphins playoff run, getting too excited about fantasy football and Free Agency and creating some giant spreadsheets. It turned out that it was really, really fun to interrogate how stupid I am, a practice I had not really engaged in since college, and chronicle my attempts to get smarter. It was humbling to compile a team-building document, and then watch teams across the league defy my expectations at every turn. In 2021, I attempted to write up a numbers-based preview compiled from the big fish in the analytics community (ESPN, Football Outsiders, Pro Football Focus, independent guys like Warren Sharp) and it didn’t tell me shit. The Dolphins fired off a 1-7 record after I spent each week convinced I had discovered the mismatches. I slowed down the numbers in 2022, focusing instead on narratives written out for every team, attempting to just fire them off and publish them in the Summer every other day expecting my friends and family to care. They were outdated by the time the games arrived, and they were exhausting. Living in the Detroit Lions locker room for a week or more in late June was boring, mostly because I don’t really care about the third safety of the Detroit Lions until they play the Miami Dolphins. Thus, no fun.
If there’s anything studying the shit out of some random stupid interest offers, it is a further connection to that interest. There is money to be made by pretending that your time and energy has led to mastery: sign up here and you, too, can master the thing you love (and make money gambling on it, a topic for an entirely different time). No, time and energy just reveals that both are a finite resource, in the sense that you only have so much (these previews were mostly written between the hours of 6 and 8 AM on hot New Orleans Summer days, and edited at the same Bat-Time) and that it only provides so much. You do not get to master something because you care, especially if that thing is an understanding of a giant corporate conglomeration that is insular by nature. But you get to connect, you get to see the things you research morph and change, you gain a greater appreciation for how some coaches and players shed conventional wisdom and ride a wave as long as they can. Instead of saying to yourself “I guess Tua lifted a lot of weights this Summer” or “I guess Tyreek is really fast”, you can come to appreciate how Mike McDaniel used smart and talented players to relentlessly attack an inefficiency in the deep and intermediate middle, and you can track how long it takes before that window slams shut. Then, you can craft your own way that you might attack, draft your own counterpunch, and see how much you understand about Mike McDaniel’s intention or vision. Whatever your interest, dear reader, I recommend obsession, with an abandonment of mastery. Because, after all, “Tua lifted a lot of weights this Summer” and “I guess Tyreek is really fast” is as close to mastery of this thing as whatever I’ve been up to!
In the end, I did complete my Previews for this season, the first year in which I will actually have a preview of every Dolphins regular season game. I found a host of statistics that I will base my understanding of trends and opponents on, and studied up on the tactics used by the best offenses and defenses in the league. Along the way, I compiled an ever-growing list of shit I don’t understand (how does Andy Reid do it? Just what the fuck is a Fire Zone really? Coverage responsibilities are wild, huh?) and threw things at the wall. I will post them weekly, editing them to include 2023 understandings as I go.
Tomorrow, I will post a glossary of the various analytical measures that I like the most. It will help make some of my posts decipherable, and hopefully provide a nice benchmark with which to track the team beyond the wins and losses. Understanding these measures, and what they can and cannot predict, helped me dull the pain of losses and stall the hubris of wins because everything everywhere has an average to which outliers will someday regress. It helps you appreciate just how great those outliers, the good (Zach Thomas made Canton!) and bad (Oh no, what did Austin Jackson just do?!), can be, and was, for me, a path to appreciation of the past and present without the contamination of an unhealthy obsession with the future. To you, readership is likely just a favor to me, not an attempt to understand The Great Mean Regression In The Sky, and to help you accomplish that task, your glossary awaits tomorrow!
Thank you for reading. As the NFL told us in 2022, Football Is Family. Strap in! – Tay
