Miami Dolphins fans have spent their fair share of time this offseason fretting over the perceived lack of continuity among the Dolphins’ team — a year after Miami tore their roster down to the foundation and began the tedious process of building things back up, Miami saw both coordinators leave at the end of the season; quite the surprise for a team that got hot late and finished the season with a winning record over their final nine contests.
But ultimately, it turns out the Dolphins’ offseason wasn’t all that bad after all. The idea of “continuity” is nice, but how practical is it at the NFL level? If you’re bad, you’re going to have folks fired and replaced. If you’re good, odds are your key assistants are going to be hired away from you and promoted to try to make another team good instead. That’s the way of life in the NFL; and it is also how the Miami Dolphins will enter training camp in 2020 with one of the 10 most stable situations returning from 2019.
That is according to ESPN, who logged what percentage of snaps on both sides of the football are returning in 2020 — and what key components of the coaching staff are also returning. Here are the key metrics for the Dolphins:
- Offensive snaps returning: 75.6% (20th)
- Defensive snaps returning: 81.6% (6th)
- Starters returning: 23 (10 offense, 11 defense, 2 special teams)
Now, to be fair, just because a player is returning doesn’t mean he’ll be returning as a starter. The Dolphins are likely looking at replacing four starters on the offensive line alone. But, as ESPN’s Cameron Wolfe words it, this rendition of the team will be much closer to the one Brian Flores envisions working with in the long-term:
“The Dolphins bring back many of the same pieces from a bare-bones 2019 roster and they have an enormous load of incoming talent to compete with the incumbents. It should look a lot more like Flores’ team, featuring a multiple defense in 2020, but a dramatic overhaul of the coaching staff…combined with a bunch of incoming talent creates questions about how quickly everyone will be able to adjust in a largely virtual offseason.” — Cameron Wolfe, ESPN.com
Wolfe, as usual, is spot on — it’s not a question of if the Dolphins are any better than last year’s team. It’s rather a matter of how quickly they can establish the needed chemistry to perform at a high level; even with such a high percentage of their snaps returning to the team in 2020.