Flores Keeping Focus Narrow

Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores is looking to keep the same approach in the final weeks of the regular season

The Miami Dolphins are in the thick of the AFC playoff race, but that's of little concern to head coach Brian Flores.

Though how  his team fares in the final five games of the 2020 regular season schedule will determine whether it makes the playoffs, Flores isn't looking at the big picture.

He has preached keeping the focus strictly on the upcoming opponent from the time he took over as Dolphins head coach and he's not about to change now.

"You can't get to where you want to get without handling what's right in front of you," Flores said Monday, one day after a 20-3 victory against the New York Jets put the Dolphins in possession of sixth place in the AFC standings. "Maybe some other people can. That hasn't been the case for me in my life. You don't just jump to graduations and things like that … they don't just happen.

"My dealings with coaches around this league and players around this league is that they try to deal with what's in front of them, and don't think about what’s four or five games down the road. That’s been my experience. But that's just me. So we're just going to focus on this next week. We’ve got a big game against the Cincinnati Bengals. It's a one-game season; that's the approach we're going to take. If somebody else wants to approach it differently, by all means. But I don't see any reason why anyone would approach it any differently than a one-game season.”

The Dolphins indeed face the Cincinnati Bengals at Hard Rock Stadium next Sunday in the first of three consecutive home games before they close the season at Las Vegas and at Buffalo.

There's clearly a lot of stake in each of the final five games (hopefully), but Flores says he's not inclined to discuss that with his players.

“No, we always say, we take this one game at a time," Flores said. "I think this is a game that these guys have played since they were kids, we’ve coached it for a while also. So, to make it into something that it’s not ... it's about fundamentals and technique and execution. That's how we'll approach it, that’s how we’ll prepare. We’re not going to change anything. We’ll go out there and prepare the right way, practice, walk through and try to execute again.”

Flores clearly has a lot of experience with playoff races after his long stint with the New England Patriots, and he says December games come down to execution.

"Over the course of the season the hope is that the team is building and the execution is probably the thing that you need at this time of year," Flores said. "Everyone has 11 games on everyone else, 11 or more. We have a pretty good feel for what teams do well, what they don’t do well. It’s about execution. It's about those fundamentals and techniques we talked about in training camp that we continue to talk about throughout the course of the season, and staying on top of those. And then building on the schemes that we've run offensively, defensively and in the kicking game and really executing them at a high level. There's a pretty good chance that our opponent has an idea of what we're going to do, so execution has to be at a high level at this time. Every team, not just us.”