Karlos Dansby Hates Dolphins Didn’t Stand Behind Chad Johnson
By Josh Hill
The Miami Dolphins said hello and goodbye to receiver Chad Johnson pretty quickly after he was arrested for domestic assault on Saturday night. Johnson allegedly head butted his wife Evelyn Lozada after she found a receipt for condoms in Johnson’s car.
Johnson was on a very strict one strike policy according to ProFootballTalk.com and the Dolphins weren’t willing to budge on that stance. But linebacker Carlos Dansby doesn’t think it was the right move to bail on Johnson so quickly.
“I hate that we didn’t stand behind him,” Dansby told WMEN-AM on Monday. “I know the guys in the locker room would. But the organization felt a totally different way about the situation, and they probably had more information than we know. And they had to do what they had to do.”
There are already rumors swirling that head coach Joe Philbin had it out for Johnson and used this incident to shed the receiver from his list of problems he didn’t want to deal with over the course of the season. Johnson had never really been to large of a problem in the past on the field, but Johnson also has only had two different head coaches in the NFL and none of them have been on their first year.
Philbin addressed his players prior to Johnson’s release.
“I reminded them that on April 10 in our first team meetings, I said, ‘Guys, I’d love to stand up here and tell you we’re never going to have a problem here in Miami,’ ” Philbin said. “Do we want high-character guys? Yes. All 31 other coaches are going to say the same thing. But I specifically told them on April 10 that there will be problems that arise and you have to deal with them honestly and openly and directly. You’ve got to learn from mistakes and move on, and you can’t hide from the problem.”
There’s also the fact that the Dolphins didn’t wait for the legal process to play itself out before cutting Johnson loose. Dansby isn’t sitting well with this fact, or the fact Miami didn’t stand behind a guy he thought was going to be a voice in the locker room.
“It’s going to be an even bigger distraction right now, I think, because of the simple fact we let him go. I think if we were going to be with the guy, if he was going to be our guy, we have to stand behind him — even though the situation came about,” Dansby said. “He didn’t get that [second] or third strike.”