All of the Miami Dolphins’ changes will soon be tested. We’re approximately a week and a half away from the Dolphins’ 2020 season opener — a trip to Foxborough to play the hated New England Patriots will serve as Miami’s first litmus test of improvement. But it is important to remember that the entire 2020 season is the proper sample size needed to measure improvement. The Dolphins have introduced a slew of changes to their roster and the team will need some time to settle into their new roster and coaches.
Think of the improvement that the Miami Dolphins made from the start of the 2019 season to the end of the year: perhaps no better example exists than how Miami fared against those very same Patriots in Week 2 as compared to Week 17. In Week 2, Miami lost by a score of 43-0 — they were overwhelmed on both sides of the football and offered little resistance to Tom Brady and company. Week 17? QB Ryan Fitzpatrick engineered a game-winning drive and the Dolphins won in New England by a final score of 27-24.
Talk about improvement.
At the end of the year, we’ll get a chance to assess the Dolphins in the win column and decide if progress was made. According to the ‘Game Theory’ model from NFL.com’s Cynthia Frelund, Dolphins fans should indeed expect improvement in the win column by the end of the season — just maybe not as much as they’d like.
The forecast calls for Miami to check in at 6.5 wins at the end of the year: so if you’d like to round up we can expect 7 wins for the Dolphins in this projection. A two win improvement in the win column would certainly be a step in the right direction, especially for such a young roster that has faced so much adversity this summer amid the ongoing pandemic. But then again, the entire NFL has been faced with those same challenges of limited reps. Every year is a new year and every team is a new team for all 32 franchises, so the Dolphins certainly won’t be looking to use that as a crutch.
This team wants to compete and we should expect them to. If the Dolphins can overachieve even by the slighted margin, we can expect important football games in late December this season for a very different reason than what we saw in 2019 when the Dolphins played the Bengals. And that progress may be even more valuable than the final win tally.
