NFL Owners: The 5 worst in professional football

1. Stephen Ross, Miami Dolphins

If Stephen Ross ran his businesses like he runs the Dolphins he would be broke and living under an overpass somewhere. That’s not to say the man doesn’t have good intentions — he does — it just means since buying the majority share of the team from Wayne Huizenga in 2009, the Dolphins have more closely resembled a circus than an NFL franchise.

Not that things were great when Ross took over. Huizenga made his own share of mistakes. Whether it had been forcibly retiring Don Shula in favor of Jimmy Johnson a decade earlier, the mishandled hiring (and resignation) of Dan Marino as an executive or the fiasco with Nick Saban (which, admittedly, wasn’t really Wayne’s fault).

Compared with Ross’ mistakes though, Huizenga’s are minor league screw-ups.

Upon taking over the franchise in 2009 Ross’ first order of business was to keep the ever-fickle Bill Parcells on board as the head of football operations. He did this by redo-ing Parcells’ contract so that the Tuna could walk away at any time and still keep all of the money owed to him. It was a curious offer to make a man who had become notorious for bailing on his employers over the years. Parcells rewarded Ross’ good faith by doing exactly what everyone else expected him to do, taking the money, walking out two years early and leaving the Dolphins in the ‘very capable’ hands of coach Tony Sparano and GM Jeff Ireland.

From there things just continued to spiral. On the football side, Ross has continued to try to make patchwork fixes of broken regimes. He famously went behind Sparano’s back along with Ireland as he made a clandestine attempt to hire Jim Harbaugh. Harbaugh took one look at the dumpster-fire burning in Miami, declined and sent Ross and Ireland on their way. By the time the pair returned to south Florida, news of the trip was out and Sparano had effectively been made a lame-duck. Ross kept him for another season. Not shockingly Ireland and Sparano never patched things up and weren’t even on speaking terms by the end of the year.

So Ross canned Sparano, but didn’t fire Ireland. New head coach Joe Philbin started his tenure saddled with an ineffectual GM and by the end of his second season, the Dolphins again found themselves with a head-coach-not-speaking-to-GM situation on their hands.

If you thought Ross would learn from any of this, consider the fact many of the more notable candidates Miami interviewed for their GM vacancy this past offseason turned down the team’s offer because Ross’ newly instituted power structure would have meant Philbin, and the team’s cap specialist Dawn Aponte, didn’t even answer to the GM.

Now quickly, a team’s GM and head coach necessarily have to work closely with another. The GM has to make personnel decisions that affect the coach. There needs to be trust. There needs to be communication. Stephen Ross — fresh off two head coach/GM fiascos — decided to fix this by effectively making both roles more autonomous and having each answer directly to him. Good call.

Factor in the peripheral stuff — like orange carpets, celebrity minority owners and the construction of a night-club in the stadium — and a once-proud football culture has started to look more like a reality show you’d see on the TV network E! It’s the Kardashians meet Miami with a bit of football sprinkled in.

And it’s all thanks to Stephen Ross.