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 Spedito - 28/02/2023 : 16:03:43
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| Last season, nobody expected anything from the . Everyone in and around the football world thought the team was Tanking for Tua, and that was that. They started off the year looking like exactly as dreadful a team as many predicted, losing their four pre-bye games by a cumulative score of 163-26. They lost three more before securing their first win in Week 9, but the truth is their turnaround began immediately after the bye. In their final 12 games of the season, https://www.sharksjerseymall.com/paul-martin-jersey the Dolphins went 5-7 and were outscored only 331-280. They went from historically bad to slightly below average, and they did it pretty quickly, and with very little turnover of the roster.The Dolphins didn't end up with the first overall pick, but they did end up with on their roster, securing him with the No. 5 pick in the 2020 . But while Tua -- now starting after taking over for -- holds the key to the team's future, the more important present-day moves the Dolphins made during the 2020 offseason came on the other side of the ball. As we wrote in the early days of free agency:Adding Byron Jones is a coup for the Dolphins, who now have one of the best cornerback duos in the . Brian Flores appears to be emulating his former bo s, Bill Belichick, in highly valuing shutdown corners as the basis of a top-flight defense. Jones is an incredible athlete with great size and length, which should allow him to excel in the man coverage schemes Flores favors. He played a lot of zone in Dallas, though, and should do just fine if the Dolphins want him to play that way as well. With two premier cornerbacks (Jones and ), Flores can have them play sides or use one or both to shadow receivers on the opposing team, allowing for more creativity in designing his coverage schemes.The Dolphins spent a decent chunk of change to make some upgrades up front, landing and on sizable deals, but the key piece in the remaking of the team's front seven is Kyle Van Noy. Miscast as something resembling a pure middle linebacker in Detroit, Van Noy found a home in New England as https://www.sharksjerseymall.com/brent-burns-jersey a flexible piece able to do a bit of whatever Belichick asked of him. (Though he played almost exclusively on the edge last season.) He should operate similarly in Miami, moving all over the formation and working as a traditional linebacker, edge rusher, and occasional interior lineman.But the Dolphins weren't done there. They continued shopping throughout the free agency period, then added even more defensive talent in the draft. Here's what we wrote about Miami when all the player-acquisition was finished, in our series detailing each team's :Miami splashed the pot in free agency, handing $178.5 million worth of contracts to , , , and , plus signing , , , and , and drafting , , , , and . That is of talent to add in one offseason.In particular, there is reason to feel good about Miami's secondary, with Jones and Igbinoghene joining to form what should be one of the league's best cornerback units. Head coach Brian Flores came to Miami from New England and knows how to utilize a versatile defender like Van Noy, and is used to generating a pa s rush without a single dominant edge rusher, and should be https://www.sharksjerseymall.com/joe-thornton-jersey able to utilize Lawson and Ogbah in ways to accentuate their strengths and minimize their weakne ses. Miami is not nearly the favorite in the AFC East, but if the sheer volume of talent added on defense can coalesce into a unit in or near the top 10, perhaps the Dolphins can surprise and challenge for the new No. 7 seed in the conference.That may have seemed a bit pie-in-the-sky at the time, but seven games into their season, the Dolphins are allowing just 18.6 points per contest, the single best mark in the entire league. They rank a very solid 11th in Football Outsiders' defensive DVOA, with the 's third-ranked unit against the pa s. They're 4-3 at nearly the midway point of the 2020 campaign, putting them firmly in the mix for a playoff spot.And while the Ryan Fitzpatrick-led offense played above expectations early on, the past few games (since Jones returned from his injury in Week 5) have hammered home that this is a team carried by its defense. The personnel changes have largely https://www.sharksjerseymall.com/tommy-wingels-jersey worked exactly as intended, allowing Flores to deploy players far more aggre sively than he did last year, mixing up coverages along the way. Take a look at the table below, which shows the difference between Miami's coverage usage this year and last. (Via Pro Football Focus and Tru Media)Year20192020Cover-330.2%37.5%Cover-147.0%35.3%Cover-05.5%16.3%Cover-28.4%1.0%2-Man2.6%1.3%The Dolphins have dramatically ramped up their usage of Cover-0 this season, indicating that they have been far more willing to send the house after the quarterback and trust that their cornerbacks will be able to handle themselves on the back end. So far, that trust has been paid off. In 2019, opposing pa sers completed 12 of 20 pa ses for 202 yards, five touchdowns, and just one interception against the Dolphins when they played Cover-0, per PFF and Tru Media. That's a 112.9 pa ser rating. This year, though, the Dolphins have already played more snaps in Cover-0 than they did a year ago, and pa https://www.sharksjerseymall.com/joe-pavelski-jersey sers are just 22 of 42 for 104 yards, zero touchdowns, and three picks against them -- a 28.5 pa ser rating. That's not a typo.Flores is selective about deploying his all-out blitzes, just as he is with blitzing in general. The Dolphins have sent at least one extra rusher after the quarterback on 35.3 percent of opponent dropbacks, per PFF and Tru Media, a figure that is solidly above the league average of 28.3 percent but not close to, say, the ' 41.6 percent rate, or the ' 43.8 percent mark. They save those blitzes, though, for opportune times. Take last week's win over the , for example.The Dolphins sent a blitz after on 51 percent of his shotgun snaps, a rate that far exceeds their normal blitz share. Why'd they do that? Well, because the Rams pa s the ball 89 percent of the time they're in shotgun, per PFF and Tru Media. The Dolphins knew that went the Rams went to the gun, it was almost certain to be a pa s. So they sent large numbers after the quarterback and forced him to make quick decisions. It did not go well for L.A. Flores and the Dolphins showed similar knowledge against the , , and . They flashed a double B-gap blitz against New York before dropping one defender out and leaving a guard blocking nobody https://www.sharksjerseymall.com/joel-ward-jersey while the other blitzer got to the quarterback. They showed San Francisco a mugged up front with eight men acro s the line of scrimmage, made it look like they were sending everybody, then had two guys drop back into coverage, and they got a sack because nobody blocked one of the actual blitzers, who came right up the middle. And they exploited the Patriots' tendency to pull their guards on play-action pa ses from under center by sending a blitzer right through the gap |
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Dolphins defense takes big leap Heres ho
