Will Miami's latest effort at "culture change" work?

The Miami Dolphins have chronically underachieved in recent years. And the constant response is that the culture needs to change.

They’re saying it again. The overriding question is whether they mean it this time.

Based on comments made this week by veteran edge rusher Bradley Chubb, there’s a chance they don’t. Because, as Chubb tells it, they were fibbing last year about embracing change.

“I’m going to say last year, we were lying honestly,” Chubb told reporters. “Point blank, period. We felt it. We put our toe in the water, but we didn’t dive all the way in. We didn’t get all the way there with each other. We weren’t making the effort to go the extra mile and I would say this year, we’re doing that. I’m not sure how it’s going to turn out for us, but we are putting forth that foot to change it because last year, like I said, we said we wanted to change, ‘Yeah, we’re doing this, we’re doing that, but it’s not going exactly how we want to.’ But this year, I feel like everybody has the right mindset and moving forward, so if it works out, it’s going to work out. If it doesn’t, we’re going to get back to the drawing board and make sure it works out.”

They can only go back to the drawing board so many times. At some point, the only way to change the culture is to change the coach.

And the current coach, Mike McDaniel, wishes he’d known that last year’s effort to make things different, and in turn better, wasn’t working.

“It would have been awesome if he would have told me on the front end when they were lying,” McDaniel told reporters. “Beyond that, 2024, unless I’m using it directly for an analogy, I’m much more concerned with 2025. I think you do a lot more for the organization if you spend your time thinking forward in terms of not this, that, or the other, or whose fault it was. ‘No, we want it like this, let’s do it like this and this is who we are.’ I don’t even — what year did you speak of? I guess I’ll read about that in history books.”

So that’s the gimmick this year. They’re forgetting about last year. When the gimmick was to start all the meetings at 24 minutes after the hour, in reference to the fact that it had been 24 years since the team’s last playoff win. (Actually, that’s a pretty good reason to forget about 2024.)

So what are the players doing differently this year — and not lying about this time?

“It’s not necessarily him changing,” Chubb said regarding McDaniel. “It’s more about us, man, about how we accept what he’s telling us. Like he may have a joking way of getting a serious point across, but it’s up to us in the room to be like, ‘Okay, he might have said it funny, but at the end of the day, this is what we’re doing and this is how we’re moving about it and as a team, this is what we’re going to do.’ So not much of him has changed. I would say the people around him and the buy-in of the players that he wants has changed and guys are taking accountability of how we want it to look out here because he can only do so much in terms of with the game plan, the team meetings and all that, prepping and putting us in the right position; but we’ve got to go out there and execute. So I wouldn’t say he’s changed. I would say the mindset around him and around the team has changed.”

Maybe it has. Maybe it will. It would be foolish to assume change is coming for the Dolphins until it does. McDaniel is trying to make change happen by demanding more accountability.

“I think some of the non-negotiables were the football program has to focus on football,” McDaniel said. “For that to happen, there’s a lot of things that can’t dominate people’s time, which is like, first and foremost, being on time. Being accountable to each other and staying to the rules or feeling very open as a team that, hey, it’s OK to call someone out when they deserve to be called out, and for those people, it’s OK to be called out as long as you change your [expletive] behavior.”

But when does it ever work that anyone in a position of authority — coach, teacher, boss, whatever — has demonstrated a very unique and authentic style for multiple years and then changes in a way that the players, students, workers, whatever will take seriously? For McDaniel, it will be hard to suddenly counter three years of not demanding basic things like players being on time.

Maybe McDaniel can pull it off as he enters year four. But, as Chubbs tells it, the effort to change the culture in his third year didn’t take. That’s reason enough to be skeptical that things will be different in 2025.

And that the culture could change very dramatically in 2026.

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