Snapping a five-season playoff drought, the Dolphins made back-to-back postseason trips in 2022-23. However, they were one-and-done on each occasion as the club still longs for a playoff victory, something the Dolphins haven’t achieved since the 2000 season.
With a roster brimming with high-priced talent, there was plenty of needed roster shuffling ahead of last season and there’s been plenty this year, too. Notably, the team lost Calais Campbell and Armstead, two of the team’s most respected leaders.
Jalen Ramsey remains on the trade block and his departure seems as though it’s more of a when than an if. So, all is not sunshine and rainbows in South Beach as the long-sought culture change is still to be strived for.
“It would have been awesome if he would have told me on the front end when they were lying,” McDaniel said Thursday when asked about Chubb’s comments. “Beyond that, 2024, unless I’m using it directly for an analogy, I’m much more concerned with 2025. I think you do a lot more for the organization if you spend your time thinking forward in terms of not this, that, or the other, or whose fault it was. No, we want it like this, let’s do it like this and this is who we are. I don’t even — what year did you speak of? I guess I’ll read about that in history books.”
Chubb is looking forward, though, and is optimistic his teammates will finally buy in and change their outlook and fortunes. Along that gaze, he also underscored that it’s not about McDaniel — who coached the team to playoff berths in each of his first two seasons at the helm — altering his approach, it’s about the guys on the field.
“It’s not necessarily him changing,” Chubb said. “It’s more about us, man, about how we accept what he’s telling us. Like he may have a joking way of getting a serious point across, but it’s up to us in the room to be like, ‘Okay, he might have said it funny, but at the end of the day, this is what we’re doing and this is how we’re moving about it and as a team, this is what we’re going to do.’
“So not much of him has changed. I would say the people around him and the buy-in of the players that he wants has changed and guys are taking accountability of how we want it to look out here because he can only do so much in terms of with the game plan, the team meetings and all that, prepping and putting us in the right position; but we’ve got to go out there and execute.”