The Miami Dolphins finally got a taste of victory in Week 7, and while a 28-25 win over the New York Jets won’t rescue their season by itself, it sure changes the conversation around it. Miami is 1-5 now, which is hardly a number to brag about, but it’s a lot better than the nightmare scenario people spent all summer talking about.
For months, there was a real belief that the Dolphins could become the first team to finish 0-17. Some analysts had already started penciling in a winless year for Miami before the Jets game even ended.
That didn’t happen. The Dolphins found a way to close out a tight one, and in a season built around youth and growing pains, that matters.
Head coach Jeff Hafley said Monday that the mood around the building reflected how much the victory meant to a roster full of players still getting used to this part of the league.
“Obviously, you could feel the energy and the excitement,” head coach Jeff Hafley said on Monday. “It’s what I thought, there’s a lot of young guys, a lot of this team has never won an NFL game.
So a lot of it today, it’s their first Monday. I mean, I didn’t even have to give a victory Monday, because most of the players on our team don’t even know what a victory Monday is.
They’re too young. But you could see the energy and the excitement and the confidence.”
That’s the backdrop here: Miami has the youngest roster in the NFL, and this is a full-scale reset. Roster, coaching staff, front office - everything got stripped down.
The organization had spent years trying to build around speed, pre-snap motion, mismatch hunting, and expensive veteran additions on both sides of the ball. The results never really arrived.
The Dolphins haven’t won a playoff game since 2000, a drought that dwarfs even the Jets’ misery. New York’s postseason absence runs back to the 2010 season, giving the Jets 15 straight years without a playoff appearance. Miami’s playoff-win drought is 10 years longer than that, with a long list of head coaches - Nick Sabin, Cam Cameron, Tony Sparano, Joe Philbin, Adam Gase, Brian Flores, and Mike McDaniel - all coming up empty when it came to postseason victories.
So this rebuild is something different. The idea seems to be that owner Stephen Ross finally stopped trying to patch over the problem and decided to start over. That puts the burden on execution, and against the Jets, the Dolphins delivered just enough of it.
They played like a more complete team for one game. The offense scored, the defense held up when the game tightened, and special teams made its presence felt.
There was a middle stretch where Miami had to absorb the Jets’ push, but it didn’t collapse. In a season that should include plenty of rough patches, that’s a meaningful step.
The young Dolphins are still figuring things out. They’re adjusting to the speed of the NFL, learning new assignments, and getting used to the complicated looks teams throw at them every snap. That process is still very much underway, and Hafley made it clear Monday that the victory doesn’t change the standard.
“When I watch the tape with them, it’s win or lose, we got to be real with each other and turn on the tape,” Hafley said. “And when you watch the tape, it’s always nice to put the result aside, win or lose, and just focus on what we did well, what we need to do better, and move on…The guys were happy last night and there’s good energy in the building, but I think though it’s a young group, it’s a mature group and they understand that after they leave the building today it’s over and we have a really good team coming into play us at home. So we’ve got work to do and we got to get back to it.”
That’s the part the Dolphins have to carry forward: not just the relief of winning, but the habit of handling it the right way. Malik Washington called the result a boost, but not a reason to change how the team operates.
“I think for us it’s somewhat of a confidence boost; I think we’re going to operate business as usual, whether we won or lost. We’re going to come in, we’re going to work, we’re going to see what details we need to clean up.
But this is somewhat of a confidence boost to know like, hey, we can do this and we can keep pushing forward. So I’m excited to see us do it again this Sunday.”
Rookie safety Michael Taaffe echoed that same message, pointing to the way the coaching staff kept the focus on improvement instead of letting the result cover up the flaws.
“I think the win was awesome. I think it was really cool for us.
So fun to see all of our hard work come to fruition. But I gotta credit our coaching staff and the leaders on the team because today it felt like every other Monday.
We’re not going to change, we’re not going to be somebody different. We’re going to look at how we need to improve and we’re going to say good job about the plays that we did well on.
And so I thought that was really cool because I’ve been on other teams that aren’t like that. Sometimes the problems are masked by the result.
And so they did a really good job today of not masking the problems just because we got a win and showing, hey, we need to get better. And in order to win against New England next week, we got to do things to correct.
And so I think they did a really good job with that.”
That’s the real takeaway from Sunday. One win doesn’t make a season, but it can change the mood, steady a young locker room, and keep a rebuild from feeling pointless.
Miami is still growing, still learning, still fixing itself in real time. But it is not an 0-17 team, and now it has proof of that in the standings.
The Dolphins won. In the NFL, that’s not a small thing.
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