Dolphins' tanking: A case for and against the strategy

Tunison: Sure, the Browns rebuild project looks promising when viewed from 2019, but how many attempts did they have to go through until it resulted in something potentially viable?

Cleveland and other teams have stockpiled picks only for it to result in relatively little. Ultimately, you're somewhat improving your odds of adding one or two more reliable starters, but the draft is forever a crapshoot. How soon we forget the '90s Jimmy Johnson Dolphins teams that tried a similar strip-and-burn approach thinking they'd be the next Cowboys dynasty but ended up in the middle of the pack for a few years. 

In some ways, tanking for picks is an easy way for a GM to forestall judgment on a tenure because it could be years before you can make definitive conclusions on whether it worked. First, you have the actual year or two of tanking, then you have to give the picks two or three years to play out before determining their worthiness. Potentially you're sinking four or five seasons into a project with little assurance of success. 

That process played out a few times in Cleveland before now, when it seems like it's on the verge of paying off. It still is not guaranteed until we see it. If Cleveland were a city with less of an inbuilt culture surrounding its football team, you might have seen truly atrocious support.

From what the Dolphins have shown so far, including these recent moves, it doesn't seem like Miami is high on Rosen at all. If the Dolphins really thought he was their guy, they'd continue to build around him and not force him to suffer through the type of losses that can further mess with his confidence and subject him to physical battery. If anything, this signals they don't particularly have much faith in Rosen and will be prepared to take a quarterback at No. 1 next year. 

But then they'll be in a situation where they'll have to sit that rookie for a year because the players around him will be too mediocre or too green to let him thrive as a starter right off the bat. So, yeah, tanking is fine to put up with assuming it works. If not, fans feel like they've been sold a bill of goods, and the team is right back where it started.

Mueller:  At least it’s a plan, you know? It feels like half the NFL is trying to get to 9-7, hope that’s good enough to make the playoffs, then take their chances from there. That’s not really a defined strategy; it’s just throwing whatever at the wall and hoping it sticks. 

I realize much of this stems from the fact that finding a quarterback is hard, but it’s not like building a strong team with a defined identity elsewhere is forbidden. Look to what Jacksonville did two years ago as proof that even a Blake Bortles-led team can get close to glory. Having said that, the league openly embraces parity, so it probably wants those teams striving to be 11^th- and 12^th-best in the league year after year. It can make for some ugly football and some truly directionless franchises that are constantly two steps behind and chasing. At least tanking teams are trying to stink up the joint so that they can dominate the league sooner rather than later.

As for Rosen, I hope this is Miami’s way of letting him ease into the season. Guys like Ryan Fitzpatrick exist to take lumps for a few weeks so that touted young quarterbacks can get comfortable and then take over when they have at least some semblance of an idea what they’re getting into.

If you’re trying to lose, why bother playing a second-year guy who has already spent one year getting physically destroyed behind a bad offensive line? What’s the upside? It seems like it would make more sense to let him take over midstream, when maybe his command of the offense is stronger and he can protect himself merely by reading defenses better.

If I were a Dolphins fan, I might be mad right now, but the team was going to be terrible with Tunsil there, so I’d be excited about getting a bounty of picks for him. Take it from a long-time Pittsburgh Pirates fan: There's nothing worse than feeling like your team doesn't know what it wants to do, much less how to do it. 

Tunison: Because there are so few good-to-great quarterbacks — now even fewer with Andrew Luck's retirement — you're going to see the NFL turn into the NBA if a larger embrace is made of tanking, with the handful of teams with top passers making a sincere go at it for a championship and the rest content to waste everyone's time in pursuit of future prospects. 

You can make an argument for that strategy on the individual level, but a widespread use of the approach is bad for the game on the whole. 

There are certainly weaknesses to the type of parity that results in everything bleeding toward the middle. I'll still take that over a situation where maybe four teams have a realistic shot each year, and everyone else is tacitly waving the white flag. 

It's one thing in "Madden," when you can simulate seasons and move on with your life. In reality, it's asking your fans to knowingly consume a bad product in the hopes of a future success that isn't assured. Work takes up more and more of our lives as it is, and now even our leisure pursuits and hobbies are asking us to slog through what amounts to work-like devotion for maybe some delayed gratification. 

The problem with Rosen's situation is that he has been so devalued in his brief stint in the league, he'll be a hard sell to justify waiting through all this losing. Even if the Dolphins throw Fitzpatrick to the wolves, at some point you have to build Rosen up. He's been bad with, and humiliated by, one team already, and his current one isn't making any significant shows of faith. 

Say Miami goes 2-14, Rosen barely plays and we get to April 2020. Are fans and media really going to be OK with passing up a sexy top pick quarterback in favor of one who has looked shaky at best through two seasons and is roundly disrespected in league circles? Probably not. 

It's true Miami was going to be bad either way this season. But at least with a semblance of effort, you could get a sense of what they have in Flores. Sure, he could take this awful roster to six or seven wins and it would be a resounding personal success, but then it would defeat the point of tanking. 

And if the Dolphins do go 1-15, or 2-14 or whatever gets them that coveted top pick, what exactly do they make of their new head coach? You're starting a rebuild around an unproven commodity leading the way, and there won't be any accountability for failing to get the job done for years.