Why Your Team Sucks: Miami Dolphins

Some people are fans of the Miami Dolphins. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Miami Dolphins. This 2009 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group.

1. Nothing beats a weak undefeated team with a convicted cocaine trafficker as its spokesman. Ugh. Mercury Morris. This has all been rehashed before, but let's just get it out of the way up top. The 1972 Miami Dolphins are the saddest, douchiest collection of Grey Ghosts ever assembled. During their "dominant" regular season run that year, the Dolphins beat a grand total of two teams with winning records (and both of those team were a mere one game over .500). The winning percentage of the Dolphins opponents that year was .365. This year, the team with the NFL's easiest schedule is Chicago, with a .414 winning percentage for its opponents, which includes playing the 0-16 Lions twice). Texas Tech's nonconference schedule is harder than the supposed gauntlet those Dolphins had to run. I don't even know how you end up with a schedule that easy. We should note 1972 as a strike year or something.

If that exact same team played in today's NFL, they wouldn't win a single game. Not one. They'd be outweighed by fifty pounds along either line, and the average defensive end now can run faster than Mercury Morris ever did. They'd be crushed into nothing. They'd be a fucking joke. So when Mercury Morris (who, again, went to jail for three years for trafficking cocaine) pipes up after Super Bowl XLII and says, "When this (Burress) kid scored, a tear came to my eye because I'm emotional. You guys know you never see me like this. I'm very humbled at what the Giants were able to do as underdogs, realizing that on any given Sunday anyone can beat anyone else — except in 1972," I don't think there's a football fan out there who wouldn't like to see him fall into a vat of boiling whale blubber. Seriously, Mercury, get fucked. No one cares about your oldass team. I assume you keep rehashing games from thirty-seven years ago because you have nothing resembling a useful life now and would turn back to trafficking cocaine the second you realized that fact. So do us all a favor and die getting caught in a boat propeller.

2. Finkle is Einhorn! Einhorn is Finkle! It's fun to watch Miami fans suffer because they're still waiting for a quarterback to come along who will act as spiritual successor to a guy who never won a Super Bowl and was arguably the biggest cocksucker to ever play the position. In the entirety of Dan Marino's playing career, was there ever an interception that was HIS fault? No. Did Marino ever throw a ball poorly? Heavens, no. Of course not. No one was better at glaring at his own teammates than Marino. Before Kobe Bryant came along, Dan Marino stood as the best example of a self-appointed team leader no one else could fucking stand. Go to a pickup basketball game at your local YMCA sometime and you will see BOATLOADS of assholes like this. Guys who take it upon themselves to be both player and Bear Bryant, chewing out teammates in the guise of making them better, but really just because they get their rocks off on yelling at people. That's Dan Marino's true legacy. It's not the TD records (since eclipsed) or the lightning quick release. It's him staring down some poor wideout who probably would have caught that ball if ol' Dan had just decided to put a little more touch on it.

Oh, and the line was moving on that spike play against the Jets.

3. Fucking Hootie. Any time I think about the Dolphins, that fucking song gets stuck in my head against my will. I am prisoner to its tunelessness. I ONLY WANNA BE WITH YOOOOOOOOOOOO. Jesus Christ. Do you realize that album sold 16 million copies? SIXTEEN FUCKING MILLION. Right when I was in college. THEY PLAYED IT IN THE COLBY LOCKER ROOM. Bullshit. I could have been born earlier and gone to college during the hair metal era. I could have born later gone to college during the slutty 2000's. But noooo, I got the Hootie and Alanis shitpie. Life is shit, and songs like that are the reason why.

4. Come on back to the pack, fellas. Does anyone expect this team to top their 11 wins from last year? No, they do not. The Dolphins don't get the hilariously awful West divisions to play against again this year. The schedule is twice as hard, which means all the cute little Wildcat plays they ran last year will probably get stuffed time and time again. The team has yet to sell out any of their home games this year. Why, even Dolphin fans don't have much faith. Who knew fans in South Florida could be so flaky?

5. The readers have their say. From our own Matt Sussman:

I had a friend in college who was watching his Dolphins play on Sunday night. His Fins scored a touchdown. For whatever reason, he was going shit-crazy ballistic with joy. His girlfriend he had met a couple weeks before tried to calm him down, but instead he picked her up and threw her on the bed, at which point she bounced up and hit her head on the wall. From what I hear, he must've watched five, maybe 10 more minutes of the game before he realized his girlfriend had a freaking concussion.

What does this have to do with me? For whatever reason, at midnight on a Sunday, I had to drive my ass to the hospital to pick the guy up. Needless to say, I lost my primo parking space, and suddenly had a 15-minute walk to get to my car that week. This is a perfectly good reason that they suck. Every time they do something good, I lose a highly coveted parking spot. Fortunately that hasn't happened for years.

And Adam S.

I fucking hate this team more than anything in life. I despise the Dolphins more than Brussels sprouts, CT from Real World: Paris, and sex with the lights off.

And Evan:

I've hated the Dolphins since I was a child, a western New York boy forced to live in Pittsburgh. It wasn't all bad - as a Bills fan it was pretty cool to know that Jim Kelly, my football idol, was from the same area I was living. But you know who else was from there, and was a local hero? Fucking Dan Fucking Marino.

So being so young, my dad and mom would bring me to this bar near our house (yes, we were that kind of family) that was owned by Kelly family friends, and they would give me various Jim Kelly autographed paraphernalia. Two of these "friends" were neighbors - one a Steelers fan, the other a Dolphins fan. The year was 1991, following the Norwood Super Bowl, and the Dolphins asshole, who was about 2 years older than me, thought it would be funny to take my Jim Kelly autographed football and drop kick it into a large drainage pond, screaming "Wide Right," a taunt his father taught him. Fortunately, my father had taught me the effect of throwing nine-volt batteries at professional football players (a skill later used when Bryan Cox played for the Dolphins), and thus I went Good Son-era Macaulay Culkin on that bitch ass Elijah Wood. Being that I was 8 years old, any record of assault has been expunged from my record.

Ah, youth.

Wanna be part of the Deadspin NFL previews? It's simple. Just email me here and give me some reasons why the team you hate most sucks. If it's because you dated a fan of the team and she turned out to be some crazy bitch who keyed your car, all the better. I'll throw any good material into the post and give you proper credit. We've got the Bills, Chargers, Chiefs, and AFC North to go.

Send an email to Drew Magary, the author of this post, at drew@deadspin.com.

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