Life came at Mike McDaniel fast, and now his Dolphins might be coming undone

He sprinted off the Gillette Stadium field after a halftime interview, giving a sly look back at the NBC camera in mid-stride. At that moment — his Miami Dolphins up 14 points on Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots, his offbeat swag undeniable — Mike McDaniel commanded his surroundings as masterfully as Chris Rock doing an HBO standup special.

And everyone who knew anything about football was in on the joke.

It was September 2023, and McDaniel, in his second season, was hotter than a South Florida Bikram yoga studio. The next Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium, Miami dropped 70 points on the Denver Broncos. Had McDaniel not eschewed a late field goal attempt, the Dolphins could have broken the NFL’s single-game regular-season scoring record. The quirky, unconventional coach had injected life into a staid and hyper-serious profession.

Two years later, the football-watching world has turned on McDaniel. Now people aren’t laughing with him; they’re laughing at him. His presence on the visitors’ sidelines at Highmark Stadium on Thursday night will not be a comfortable one.

Coming off a vexing home defeat to the Patriots, the reeling Dolphins (0-2) are heavy underdogs against the Buffalo Bills. An embarrassing loss to the 2-0 Bills in a nationally televised standalone game could compel Miami owner Stephen Ross to bring an abrupt end to a once-celebrated coaching experiment.

Only Ross knows whether things are that dire, but the buzzards (metaphorically) are circling — and so, literally, is an airplane: Before Sunday’s game at Hard Rock, fans looked up to see a small aircraft toting a crowdsourced banner (“FIRE GRIER. FIRE McDANIEL”) urging the dismissal of the coach and the general manager (Chris Grier) who hired him.

Life comes at you fast in the NFL, especially when you are an eccentric dude with a distinct fashion sense and an ultra-dry sense of humor.

For most of McDaniel’s first two seasons, a lot of people got the jokes and grooved on the vibe.

These days, the laugh lines aren’t landing — perhaps even in the Dolphins’ locker room.

All of this, of course, is a direct response to the scoreboard. McDaniel won 20 of his first 33 games, including a narrow playoff defeat in Buffalo at the end of his rookie season. In that game, the Dolphins — reduced to playing their third-string quarterback, rookie Skylar Thompson — fought back from a 17-0 deficit and nearly pulled off a massive upset on their final drive.

Since then, however, McDaniel has gone 8-14, including a 26-7 road playoff defeat to the Kansas City Chiefs in which Miami’s offense appeared lifeless amid the frigid weather. The Dolphins haven’t won a postseason game since 2000, the league’s longest current drought, and appear to be on a sharp downward trajectory.

Granted, it’s the NFL, and things can change in an instant — perhaps even with a shocking upset of the Bills on “Thursday Night Football.”

Yet unless and until the Dolphins start winning again, McDaniel will remain a punch line and punching bag for a large section of the football world that, even amid the early affection, always saw him as an unnerving outlier. A day after the Dolphins absorbed a season-opening, 33-8 thrashing at the hands of the Indianapolis Colts, former New York Jets and Bills coach Rex Ryan — whose idea of “cool” once included foot-fetish videos — called McDaniel “nerd boy” during a diatribe on ESPN’s “Get Up.”

“Maybe he’s on a different level, McGenius guy, or whatever the hell he is. Nerd boy,” Ryan said. “Their team has no respect for the coach. They play like that. They’re like ‘Come on, man, get us a dang guy in here.’ Where’s the physicality of this team? They’re soft. … They have tons of talent. They don’t play with any passion.”

It’s not just old-school coaches like Ryan who are coming for McDaniel. Many of the people who loved him in the beginning — and I imagine some of the people reading this fall into this category — are rolling their eyes at his perceived schtick, authentic as it may be.

Remember when McDaniel, after Justin Fields’ repeated scrambles, told the then-Chicago Bears quarterback to “Stop it!” during a 2022 game, and everyone laughed? There are people out there that I’d beseech to follow that same two-word advice when it comes to piling on.

The larger concern is that some of these people may be lodged inside the Dolphins’ organization and, specifically, wearing helmets and shoulder pads on game day.

How did we get here? In retrospect, it’s not all that surprising, given the context of this head coach’s hiring. McDaniel followed Brian Flores, whose brusque leadership style alienated many people in the organization and destroyed his franchise quarterback’s confidence.

McDaniel smartly went the other way, embracing Tua Tagovailoa from the start. He constructed a fast-paced offense designed to maximize the passer’s talents and was on board with the franchise’s decision to sign him to a four-year, $212.4 million extension in July 2024.

While successfully changing the Dolphins’ culture and improving the workplace environment, McDaniel, league sources say, was at times overly lenient with star players such as wide receiver Tyreek Hill and cornerback Jalen Ramsey, forgiving poor practice efforts and other behavior perceived by teammates and assistant coaches as selfish. Hill, who told reporters minutes after a season-ending loss to the Jets last January, “I’m out, bro. It was great playing here,” eventually walked back the comments and remained on the team. Ramsey was traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers in June, with Miami reacquiring star safety Minkah Fitzpatrick in the deal.

Since the end of last season, according to numerous Dolphins sources, McDaniel has been intentional in his attempt to tighten up the operation. However, it’s always easier to go from stricter to more permissive in the locker room than to do the opposite, and the Dolphins’ choppy start has created the impression that there’s a lack of focus.

The Dolphins haven’t quit, but their operation has been sloppy. For example, they had two chances to mount a game-winning drive in Sunday’s fourth quarter but were undermined by pre-snap penalties. Afterward, McDaniel owned it, saying, “I’m very frustrated — there’s some coaches and players that did not execute communication in a very dire period of the game. With the game on the line, our communication and our substitution was not up to par — and ultimately I hold all responsibility for all things, so I will make sure that things that should already be ironed out moving forward, we will not fall victim to the same thing again.”

Given McDaniel’s loyalty to his quarterback, it was somewhat jarring to hear Tagovailoa’s take: “It was frustrating with the communication, with the guys inside the huddle and then what the personnel is, then the play. Do we have too many guys in? Why do we have another guy running in? Just the whole operation of that was not up to standard, was not up to par. I got to do a better job with our guys in that sense.”

As John Lennon once sang, “Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.”

A few victories, of course, would have many singing a different tune. As someone who knew McDaniel long before he became trendy, I’m hopeful that he can stay true to his essence, learn from his struggles and fight his way out of this mess.

His rise to the top of the profession is a truly inspirational underdog story. To his credit, rather than simply try to emulate a mentor like Kyle Shanahan (a strategy that imploded for so many ex-Bill Belichick assistants, such as Flores), McDaniel hasn’t been afraid to be himself and buck head-coaching stereotypes.

In the spring of 2022, shortly after McDaniel parlayed his first and only NFL head-coaching interview into his Dolphins gig, we sat together in a Fort Lauderdale restaurant and discussed the challenge that awaited him. More than his well-documented strategic acumen, McDaniel said he looked forward to demonstrating what amounted to his crisis-management skills — the ability to navigate the type of “high-octane pressure situation” he’d encountered on numerous occasions as one of Shanahan’s trusted lieutenants.

“Oh, that’s actually what I’m most excited about. ’Cause I think, within every game and within every season, there’s a point … where you’re like, ‘Oh f—’ … and there’s uncertainty and there’s stress,” he said. “And in my opinion, that’s when head coaches actually earn their money. So I’m excited for the fact that I know that s—’s gonna hit the fan, or there’s gonna be pressure, and I think that I’m more built to thrive in that.”

Is he running out of time? Well, it’s the NFL, so that’s a distinct possibility. McDaniel certainly wouldn’t disagree, though he’s not as fatalistic as some might perceive him, thanks to his dry delivery and a joke that didn’t land.

Back in August, when a reporter said “good morning” to the coach before the start of a news conference, McDaniel replied, “False. Great morning.” Pressed for an explanation, McDaniel channeled his inner Pink Floyd and answered, “Because we’re another day closer to death.”

Later, McDaniel told NFL Network’s Rich Eisen, “The idea of the statement is to magnify the fact that life is not infinite and so this day shouldn’t be taken for granted.”

Rest assured, this Thursday night — and however many more Dolphins game days McDaniel gets to experience as coach — most certainly won’t be.

(Top photo of McDaniel: Michael Hickey / Getty Images)

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