After getting shutout in London, can the Miami Dolphins turn around a season that was already going to be hard to salvage?
The Miami Dolphins are quickly seeing what happens when you invest $10 million in Jay Cutler to save your season. Shellacking doesn’t begin to describe what happened to Adam Gase’s team in London on Sunday, and now it’s time to question whether it can get better.
Miami started off on the wrong foot (or knee) this summer when Ryan Tannehill was lost for the year with a torn ACL. But finding a replacement for your starting quarterback in the middle of training camp is easier said than done, as seen with the Dolphins.
Bringing in Cutler to replace Tannehill was trolled, for obvious ‘Smoking Jay’ reasons, but you can’t kill the Dolphins just yet for the decision. Who else could the team have gone out and signed to replace or improve upon the position they were in with Tannehill?
Colin Kaepernick was out there — and still is — but his clashing with the Cuban community in Miami seemed to nip that idea in the bud from the start. From there it was either sign a lowly backup or back up the Brink’s truck to coax Tony Romo out of retirement.
Miami went with Cutler, and now he’s going to be the scapegoat for all that is going wrong. That’s not entirely fair, though. At least not yet. We’re just three games into the Dolphins season, and the team is only 1-2 and still has plenty of time to turn its season around.
Expecting a quarterback, even one as selectively elite as Cutler, to come in and pick things up right away is foolish. It takes entire offseasons for quarterbacks to learn systems and even then they don’t have things down pat. Cutler is a fantastic quarterback when he’s playing to his strengths, and preparation has long been among the things in the ‘Cons’ column when looking at his skills.
That’s not an excuse as to why Cutler is struggling, but it’s an explanation for the rocky start.
Cutler has the baggage of not being able to pull his team up when they’re down, and it’s narrative you have to believe he wants to change. He was able to pull the Bears back from bad starts but never took it further than that. He’s never been a motivator, so it’s not hard to see why people will write the Dolphins off after this bad start. There are more things wrong with the team than Cutler, but the change Miami needs starts with him. The only question is can he, as a 34-year old veteran, do something he’s never been able to do before and wake his team up as it slowly falls asleep?
The road doesn’t get any easier moving forward. Miami needed to get their wins early specifically to combat the tough schedule they have later on, including a matchup next week with the Falcons and a game the following week against the Jets that is hardly the gimmie it once looked to be.
Gase has helped the Dolphins stay the course before, and he’s going to need to pivot hard if the team wants to save its season. Cutler and the offense have yet to click, and it’s up to Gase to figure out a way to expedite things or he may find his seat getting hotter as the season continues to look more lost.