CLEVELAND — There goes Steve Ross, at 85, walking glumly down the concrete stadium hallway Sunday, surrounded by a team of executive suits on their way out of Cleveland. He says something, head down, hands in coat pockets, to team president Tom Garfinkel.
Down the hall, way down, comes some laughter closer to the Browns locker room. There is nothing close to laughter from the Miami Dolphins owner or his entourage.
They’ve just left a locker room full of frustration, and a coach without answers, and a quarterback who again threw too many passes to the other team, which was a bad Cleveland team this Sunday.
The Dolphins were just the worse team. Inexcusably worse. So, there is no getting around it anymore. The players and the coach can talk about holding it together for another week. But Ross, who has walked down these kinds of stadium hallways in too many bad seasons, has just one question left after his Dolphins were run off the field, 31-6.
Does he fire everyone now or fire everyone later?
It’s the question that started 12 days into the season when his team already was 0-3. Now it’s 1-6. Now the issue becomes what the owner wants to accomplish the rest of this season, if indeed there’s anything to be accomplished at all.
Maybe all you can do at this point is close your eyes and hope the season is over when you open them. Because it wasn’t just the Dolphins loss badly to a previously 1-5 Cleveland, but how badly they looked doing so.
The quarterback, Tua Tagovailoa, threw three interceptions, gift-wrapping two Cleveland touchdowns. The good news: He talked properly after the game as opposed to last Sunday when he talked of players being late to meetings.
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“It starts with me,” he said. “Can’t turn the ball over.”
The coach, Mike McDaniel, saw an embarrassment of errors beyond just those interceptions. Critical penalties that led to each of Cleveland’s three, first-half scores. Fundamental errors like a kickoff-return fumble
“We probably have 20 plays that are self-inflicted wounds,” McDaniel said. “You can’t even get onto beating the opponent if you beat yourself, so that’s where it is.”
The Dolphins even had to burn their weekly time-out for not having the proper number of players on the field, coming up one short this time on defense near the end of the half. That’s because coaches waved edge rusher Chop Robinson to come out, leaving them with 10 players. Oops.
The offense could have used that time-out a few minutes later when it had to settle a field goal before half to cut Cleveland’s lead to 17-6. It was somehow still a game. And then Tua threw a bad interception that was returned for a touchdown on the second half and it was 24-6 and not a game.
Sweep it all into one, big manure pile and it’s as bad a loss as the Dolphins have suffered in years. Certainly the worst of McDaniel’s four years. You can go back through the Brian Flores years, too, considering he was supposed to lose in his bad losses (his sin was not losing enough).
So, it’s just a question of when Ross decides to pull the plug on this regime, not whether he does. There’s no need to be nasty about any of it. McDaniel and General manager Chris McDaniel tried as best they could.
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It’s just closing time for them. That’s so obvious it hardly needs to be said. This looked like a team where the mortar was coming loose and bricks cracking on Sunday.
“You saw a lot of frustrated players,” McDaniel said. “You know, from the season, we can’t allow it to seep into our play and keep us from executing.”
So, would you really fire McDaniel today? Think about it. The Dolphins have an utterly terrible matchup against the top-ranked rushing team and No. 1 defense next Sunday in Atlanta.
Would that be fair to ask the interim coach to step into that?
And who is the interim coach? Defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver was the early candidate. But he’s as likely to be fired right now himself considering this defense is the prime problem of this season.
You’d like to wait for the bye week to fire a coach, but that’s another month away. If you wait that long, do you just wait out the season? Can you? And, again, what do you want to accomplish with 10 games left?
Besides opening your eyes and seeing this year gone.
Ross walked down the hall on his way out of Cleveland. But the questions went with him, too. The question, really.
When? Not if.
Like everything else this season, there’s not an easy answer for that, either.
