Dolphins DB throws ex-DC Vic Fangio all the way under the bus after one-year stint

Vic Fangio spent the 2023 season as the Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator, and a handful of his players took umbrage with the old-school coaching methods he brings to the table. Even now, about four months after Fangio left Miami, he’s still getting hit by shots (not strays, but shots) from his ex-players.

That’s not something that you normally see in the NFL. Players will typically be political with their word choice and not just outright say that one of their coaches, much less a coach with the resume of Fangio, is a bad guy… which is where Jevon Holland comes in.

Jevon Holland is keeping his Vic Fangio hate train rolling into the offseason.

On Tuesday, the Miami Dolphins defensive back was asked about the difference between Vic Fangio and his new defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver. Holland said that the biggest difference between the two is that Weaver is a good person.

Yikes. You don’t have to be a literary analyst to understand the implication he was making there. This lands at about an 8.5 on the ‘aggressively passive-aggressive’ scale. 

Now, this isn’t the first time Holland has targeted Fangio with a drone strike. The day Fangio left the Dolphins, Jevon posted a video telling him to kick rocks… by kicking rocks himself, which kind of ruined the metaphor, but the messaging was loud and clear.

The question all of this makes us ask is: Why? Why is Holland going out of his way to bash an old man? The answer probably lies in the teams’ philosophy and culture.

The Dolphins’ head coach Mike McDaniels isn’t a prototypical NFL head coach. He’s a nerdy-looking goofball who’s trying to be friends with his players and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s his team and if that’s the way he wants to run the show, then he gets to make those calls.

Vic Fangio is not the kind of guy to buy into that coaching style. Fangio wants to coach football players and he wants to coach them hard. In his introductory press conference with the Philadelphia Eagles, his new team, he was asked about the change that he’s seen in players throughout his 40+ year career of coaching. He said there isn’t a whole lot about the players that have changed, but it was the people around the players that have changed. 

Again, Vic is an old-school guy and he does things his way. McDaniels is a big change for players; he’s the good cop, and in this case, Fangio is the bad cop. If players have bought in on the good cop’s way of doing things, and then the team gets rid of the bad cop, that’s essentially banishing a boogeyman. Who could blame Holland, or anyone for that matter, for dancing on the grave of the guy they believe is the boogeyman?

Or maybe he just really, really hated Fangio. That could be it too. Holland is saying that Anthony Weaver is a good guy, but this is Weaver’s first time ever being a DC. No one knows how Weaver will respond to the inevitable adversity his defense is going to see. If Holland is going to bat for a guy he doesn’t know that well, then there could have been a huge personal problem between him and Fangio.

Maybe 10 years down the line, he’ll get on a podcast with LeSean McCoy and DeSean Jackson to air the dirty laundry.

The interesting thing about Holland's comment is his acknowledgment of whether or not someone is a good person. This is a guy who is on a team with Tyreek Hill. You know, the same Tyreek Hill who is a notably pretty terrible person. What does Jevon Holland think of him? 

Holland is probably able to justify the blasting of his old coach, but it’s still an anomaly whenever a player does it and it makes us feel uneasy when we see it. We can just be thankful that he wasn’t on the team with Richie Incognito or that he wasn’t there when Nick Saban was their head coach. He’d probably have some choice words for those guys.