The Miami Dolphins defense is hoping to finally get some solid results after a long offseason of overhauling the personnel. The Dolphins targeted a whole bunch of defensive veterans through free agency — with the objective of the team’s identity falling into place sooner rather than later on that side of the football. That hasn’t been reality, however. The Dolphins gave up a monumental number of rushing yards in Week 1 versus the Patriots and a terrifying amount of passing yards in Week 2 against the Bills. Miami’s defense has been balanced — but in all the wrong kinds of ways.
And in Week 3 against the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Dolphins will face a tough task in rebounding from one of their biggest flaws of Week 2 — play action passing. The Bills found a lot of success spreading the field and calling upon play action and the Jaguars can be expected to do a lot of the same.
According to NFL Network’s numbers, Jaguars quarterback Gardner Minshew has completed 13 of 17 pass attempts in play action through two games for 168 yards and three scores. So the Dolphins’ woes against play action had better be ironed out sooner rather than later, because another team is going to look to exploit those weaknesses early and often during tonight’s game.
For the Dolphins, the answer might be a bit more versatility on the back end. The Dolphins have a lot of new pieces — so a lack of depth to what is available to call and run while the team continues to learn the calls is understandable. But every team across the league is working with the same dynamics and the Dolphins can’t afford to be so “vanilla” with some of their calls, as they were in Week 2 despite Buffalo’s insistence on continuing to attack the same areas of the field.
We’ll see how big of a shift the Dolphins make defensively on a short week, but look for play action passing to be a critical factor in tonight’s contest.