Brian Flores is back on the Dolphins’ schedule, and that alone makes Week 4 worth watching. But for Miami, the bigger issue is less about the reunion and more about survival against the kind of pressure Minnesota has been unleashing through three weeks.
Jeff Hafley sees it clearly: the Vikings are bringing heat at a rate no one else in the league can match. Minnesota leads the NFL in pressures with 54, according to Pro Football Reference, 13 more than the Las Vegas Raiders.
The blitz number is even more eye-popping. The Vikings are sending extra rushers on 66.4 percent of snaps, far ahead of the Chicago Bears at 39.8 percent.
That’s a brutal assignment for any offense. For Miami, it comes after a week in which the Dolphins just dealt with another aggressive defense, and Hafley thinks that matters.
"What helps is we just went against a blitz-crazy defense with Spags (coordinator Steve Spagnuolo) and the Chiefs," Hafley said before practice Wednesday. "I mean, Spags will zero you, he's going to show all up.
He's going to bluff out, and they're going to do the same thing. So back-to-back weeks of playing really good defenses, really good coordinators, really good schemes, it's going to be a challenge for (the offensive line)."
That challenge looked a little more manageable against Kansas City, where Malik Willis wasn’t sacked at all after taking nine sacks over the first two games. Still, Minnesota is operating on another level. The Vikings have already stacked up four sacks against Green Bay, four more against Chicago and a season-high six against Tampa Bay.
Hafley knows the burden won’t fall on the offensive line alone. Against a defense that pressures like this, everyone has to be locked in.
"It's not just going to be the front, and that's just like the case last week," Hafley said. "It's going to be everybody.
It's going to be the receivers responding the right way, the tight ends responding the right way, Malik's ability to communicate, where’s our back, is he where he's supposed to be, is he seeing everything the right way. I mean, it's going to take all 11.
I think a lot of times you just want to put it on your offensive line, but a lot of times you'll see a quarterback getting ready to make a throw and the receiver's supposed to break out and he doesn't break out, or he's supposed to break in and he doesn't break in, or the running back was supposed to step up in this gap and he didn't. It's going to take all 11.
We're going to have to be on the same page. It's going to be loud, so communication is going to be a key to this game."
The Dolphins also have to figure out how much damage they can absorb and still call it a good day. Willis can extend plays with his legs when the pocket gets messy, but Miami’s ground game is in a tough spot after De'Von Achane’s season-ending knee injury.
A clean sheet in the sack column feels unrealistic. Holding the Vikings to around two sacks would probably count as a win.
Hafley’s familiarity with Flores goes beyond this matchup. He spent the past two seasons as the Green Bay Packers’ defensive coordinator in the same division, and he also knows Flores from earlier in their careers. Long before Hafley became head coach at Boston College, Flores was a defensive back there.
"Got to know him when I was at Boston College," Hafley said. "I mean, he'd come by and we'd spend time together, just being two defensive guys in the NFL. I think he's a great play caller and he's done a tremendous job there."
Miami has already faced Flores once since his departure as Dolphins head coach after the 2021 season. In 2022, he was with Pittsburgh as a senior defensive assistant and linebackers coach when the Steelers played a Sunday night game at Hard Rock Stadium.
In Other News...
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For the Dolphins, the concern is not just the record but how quickly a season can start to feel like it is slipping away when so many pieces are not quite holding together. The same theme runs through the leagues other winless starts, with different teams blamed for different reasons, but Miamis challenge is more familiar than dramatic: getting healthy, getting cleaner and finding a level of play that keeps the losses from piling up any further. [Read more 🡒]