Miami Dolphins general manager Chris Grier and coach Mike McDaniel have created a football utopia for quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.
The result is the NFL’s best offense — and it’s not even close. Nor did it happen by accident.
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In a league where so many quarterbacks taken in the first round fail because their organizations don’t surround them with enough talent, the Dolphins have given Tua Tagovailoa a good offensive line, tremendous perimeter speed, and a scheme built for him to succeed.
A perfect confluence of events happened Sunday, and Miami scored 70 points — the second-highest regular season point total in NFL history.
Miami became the first NFL team to have five passing and five rushing touchdowns in the same game. They joined the 1951 Rams as the only teams with more than 700 yards — 376 passing and 350 rushing — of total offense in NFL history.
“That’s a lot of players executing a lot of things to a standard that’s unrelenting,” McDaniel said after the game. “When you have a lead — so many leads are vulnerable in this league. So we’d talked at length all offseason just about adversity, and sometimes adversity is having a two-score lead because you can let the atmosphere dictate your product.
“So what I saw from a lot of guys … that’s guys really taking it to heart that we have one [opportunity] with this team in 2023, and we’re going to make the most of it and be unrelenting with our standards.”
Will the Miami Dolphins’ have another masterpiece in Buffalo?
As good as the offense played and as unstoppable as they looked, there’s zero guarantee they will play that well Sunday in Buffalo.
First, the Bills have a much better defense than Denver. Second, there’s a natural emotional letdown after hearing superlatives about their performance all week.
Finally, history says it won’t happen.
Since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970, four teams have scored more than 60 points.
The 2011 New Orleans beat Indianapolis, 62-7. They scored 21 points in a loss to the St. Louis Rams the following week.
The 1985 Jets beat Tampa Bay, 62-28, and slipped past the Patriots, 16-13, the next week.
The 1973 Atlanta Falcons, which beat New Orleans, 62-7, were shut out 31-0 by the Rams in the next game and scored just 15 points in the next three games.
The 1972 New York Giants beat Philadelphia and lost their next game, 13-10, to Cincinnati.
Bottom line: the four teams that scored 62 points since the merger averaged 12.5 points in their next game.
The Miami Dolphins should fare better because Tua Tagovailoa is playing better than any quarterback not named Pat Mahomes.
Plus, the Dolphins did all that damage without Jaylen Waddle, who averaged 18.1 yards per catch last season.
“We always have the next-guy mentality going, but when we do have Jaylen Waddle, it presents many more challenges for defenses,” Tagovailoa told reporters. “But needless to say, we’ve got our run game going. We had our deal with our pass game, our action game. I’m very proud of the guys and the way they came out.”
McDaniel has built this offense around a strong running game built on speed and deception. All of it is tied to the passing game, which means running and passing plays often look alike.
And there’s so much speed on the field at every position that one false step or bad read can lead to a touchdown.
The running game makes Tagovailoa a better player because he doesn’t have to do everything, and the down and distance are usually in Miami’s favor.
Grier ensured the running game worked by drafting right tackle Austin Jackson (1st round) and Robert Hunt (2nd round) in 2020. He signed center Connor Williams, left guard Isaiah Wynn, and left tackle Terron Armstead in free agency.
But his boldest love was trading for receiver Tyreek Hill the year after drafting Waddle.
That gave Tagovailoa playmakers all over the field and created the foundation for Miami’s unstoppable offense.
Jean-Jacques Taylor is an NFL Insider for Sportsnaut and the author of the upcoming book Coach Prime: Deion Sanders and the Making of Men. Follow him on Twitter.