MIAMI GARDENS — The Miami Dolphins locker room was a beehive of activity Tuesday. The card table was occupied, the Pop-A-Shot game was bustling, the birthday celebration for center Aaron Brewer was going, and smiles and laughs were everywhere you looked.
Finally, the fun is coming back to one of the NFL’s most fun locker rooms. We’ll see if it makes a difference in Thursday’s pivotal game against the Baltimore Ravens (2-5).
And, no, Sunday’s 34-10 victory over Atlanta wasn’t at the root of Tuesday’s good times in the locker room.
“The fun didn’t come as a byproduct of the win,” wide receiver Malik Washington said. “The fun came before the win, and we kind of focused on that last week heading into that game. (We said) ‘Let’s just have fun. Let’s be together. Let’s do what we have to do, but let’s have fun with it.’ ”
The Dolphins (2-6) have always been a fairly loose bunch under coach Mike McDaniel, through good times and bad times. Fortunately for the Dolphins, the good times were plentiful. For the previous three years they played winning football, they were great on social media, they had great touchdown celebrations, and they had great sound bites.
But the fun disappeared earlier this season due to injuries and mounting losses. The fun seemed to be returning for a brief while. It was the Buffalo game. Wide receiver Jaylen Waddle scored a touchdown shortly before halftime to tie the game at 14-14 and did his “Waddle” celebration. Fellow wide receiver Tyreek Hill scored a touchdown early in the fourth quarter to tie the game at 21-21 and did a backflip.
But eventually the Dolphins suffered a 31-21 loss to the Bills, dropping their record to 0-3.
The Dolphins defeated the New York Jets the following week to get to 1-3, but that game included Tyreek’s season-ending knee injury. What followed was a three-game losing streak, chatter about McDaniel’s future, and an oral misstep by quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who faced a load of national criticism after he mentioned players have been late to player-led meetings.
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That led to an understandable malaise.
Now there are strong indications that fun is returning to the Dolphins, who have always maintained a fighting spirit and strong mindset.
“It’s fun winning,” said fullback Alec Ingold, a team captain, “and I think we’re finding fun in working. I think the work’s always been there, and you can do it with a little bit more joy when you get the results.”
The fun also seems to be returning for the normally upbeat, quick-witted McDaniel, who had been understandably low-key recently. He made a couple of wisecracks Monday during his media session. Once, while discussing Tua’s ugly left eye condition, McDaniel quipped, “He has a Halloween costume, for sure.”
By the way, players who have been on other teams tell me the Dolphins aren’t unusual in their fun-loving ways in the locker room.
Guard Daniel Brunskill said when he was with San Francisco, the 49ers had a “full basketball hoop with a big basketball.” He said in Tennessee the Titans had a Pop-A-Shot game with multiple card tables along with X-Boxes and PlayStations.
“Every team has something, I think,” he said.
Wide receiver Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, who is in his first season with the Dolphins after spending the previous five with Tennessee, said McDaniel has managed to keep things light despite the 2-6 record.
“I know he’s been consistent, even in meetings, regardless of up or down, good or bad, of still having that same mentality of keeping it loose when it needs to be, being serious when it needs to be,” he said.
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It all goes back to mindset.
“We keep making it too much about work,” Washington said. “We keep making it too much of a job and not as much about a football game that we get to play. We’re lucky enough to play and blessed enough to play. We’re going out there together, doing the things that we do, building upon the brotherhood that we already built and having fun with it and allowing the play to come after that. And I think, as you can see, we go out there versus Falcons and it looks like we’re having fun.
“And that’s something that we want to keep going.”