It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The Miami Dolphins have taken to the practice field and have strapped on the pads for the very first time this year, and with that landmark comes an opportunity to put the team under the microscope and look for who is really going to separate themselves from the pack in the race to secure a starting job.
At the end of the day, football is a contact sport — so padded practices will be the best tool each of the 32 teams has at their disposal to decode which players are ready for the starting lineup and which are not. For Dolphins head coach Brian Flores, he’s hoping that the next few weeks with the pads can provide him with the clarity he needs at one of Miami’s biggest problem areas: the offensive line.
“Look, there’s a lot of chemistry that has to be built (on the line). I think that’s coming along. It could be better. We’re working on a few different combinations on the o-line; but you don’t really know what you have until you put the pads on,” said Flores.
“You’re literally fighting pressure with pressure and it’s another body, working a double-team, working the combinations in the run game, feeling the speed, the speed rush, power rush, bull rush, speed-to-power, converting to power and feeling those things. You don’t know what you have until you’re put into that setting, which starts today. From a walkthrough and a non-padded standpoint, I think they’re coming along. Obviously using those 14 padded practices will tell us a lot about that group and really the entire team.”
It isn’t really football until the pads come on. And with today’s first practice in the books, Miami has their first big evaluation tool to make the kinds of personnel decisions that typically have exponentially more data before needing to be made.
