How a Bizarre Coaching Cycle Ended; Super Bowl Props Show: The MMQB NFL Podcast

The coaching shuffle concludes. Plus Super Bowl prop bets!

The strangest coaching cycle in recent memory came to a close this week. Conor and Gary break down a bad organization hiring a good coach as the Dolphins nab Mike McDaniel in search of a way to make it work with Tua Tagovailoa. They discuss an odd organization doing the weirdest thing possible as the Texans promote Lovie Smith after firing David Culley. And they look at the Saints’ decision to go the continuity route with Dennis Allen as New Orleans (might, maybe) be looking to win a very weak NFC South in 2022.

Then, friend of the show Mitch Goldich stops by to talk Super Bowl prop bets. Conor and Gary alternately praise and berate his picks—as well as Mitch himself. Will Mitch make money with his bets? Rather than waiting to see what happens in the game, we calculate his finances in real time.

The following is an automatically generated transcript from The MMQB NFL Podcast. Listen to the full episode on podcast players everywhere or on SI.com.

Gary Gramling: Hello and welcome to the MMQB NFL Podcasts, I’m Gary Gramling.

Conor Orr: And I’m Conor Orr.

Gramling: And a little bit later in the show, we’re going to get to some Super Bowl stuff. We’re going to have Mitch Goldich, friend of the show, officially come in and share some prop bets. We’re going to either praise him or berate him for each of the bets he wants to place. But before we get to that, we are going to run through the final three hires of the coaching cycle here that we haven’t touched on yet. And let’s start in Miami Connor, with Mike McDaniel, who is a guy who I think we both really like.

Orr: Yeah a favorite of mine. I mean, I’ve had him on my coaching list for a couple of years now. And I think the rap on him was that, well, he’s not Vince Lombardi in terms of, he’s not your typically great orator and he’s not going to be that coach that's going to come in there in the suit and tie and talk in platitudes and kind of make everyone feel like we have the same person as everyone else. He’s a really interesting guy. I mean, he just thinks about things a different way. But from a clinical on-field standpoint, he was basically the brains behind Kyle Shanahan's run game for years. And everyone's like, oh, well you could say that about everybody that's left the tree. But if you look at where Kyle Shanahan has been since the beginning of his career, the one guy that he’s wanting to take to every single place he’s gone is Mike McDaniel. It’ll be interesting to see how he decides to kind of build this out now in Miami. And the coaching staff that he's going to get. But I thought the hire was, it was a slam dunk. Full stop, the Dolphins are still a bad organization and I think both of those things can be true. I think you could have made a good hire, but also done some crappy things on the way out to the other person.

Gramling: Yeah, I was a little bit bummed that he ended up in that place in particular, because I was excited to see him as a head coach, but maybe not as excited to see the Dolphins get a guy who everyone should have wanted at this point. But it’s really interesting. What’s going to happen with that offense now, because obviously they’re going into the off-season with a question mark at quarterback. Do they continue to build around Tua Tagovailoa, do they get back into the sweepstakes for a Deshaun Watson or for a Russell Wilson and what’s going to happen there? But this is a guy who can theoretically, and again, you don’t just want to say, okay, well they did this in San Francisco, so now they'll do this in Miami. Uh, it’s different personnel. Though, they have tried to invest in that offensive line. They do have some high pedigree guys. But it is a hire that could conceivably repair that run game. I mean look, the 49ers, they did a lot of good things with Jimmy Garappolo. They won a lot of games. They went to a Super Bowl, they went to an NFC title game. You don’t necessarily need Tua Tagovailoa to be Justin Herbert /Joe Burrow in order to make this thing work if you can just make everything else work around him.

Orr: I think so too. See, the Bengals have me so freaked out, honestly, like, cause I’m going back now, everything that I’ve said about the Bengals before the season, and now I’m going to start to say it about eight other teams. But right now, I don't see Tua as having the ceiling of Jimmy Garappolo on his best day. I don’t see that. I haven’t had the evidence of that yet. However, I think that if you can get him on the run and you can present him with more open looks ... like you and I love the 49ers offense. We love watching it, watching it on all 22 is an incredible thing. And this isn’t saying like that you or I could operate this offense. I mean, every offense is hard, it’s hard to play in the NFL, but what they have does provide some advantages, some open looks, the question is, will the Dolphins have the personnel to do it? You need a really fast X receiver, you need a really smart secondary wide receiver. Like you need all this stuff and can you get all that in one off-season? Can you put it all together and then does Tua adapt? Because we’ve seen some quarterbacks take to it really well. And we’ve seen some quarterbacks, where it’s just kind of been another run of the mill thing.

Gary Gramling: It is a year if you step back that you can sort of do the, let’s give it a good old college try here with a quarterback for one more year. Again, outside of those big names, if Aaron Rogers gets loose, if Russell Wilson gets loose, if Deshaun Watson is someone that an organization decides that they can invest their future in, as the face of their franchise, based on what’s happened with him off the field. If you are not getting one of those guys, it’s tough out there. I’m not sure how else to say it. There’s not a whole lot out there. With the draft, there might end up being a couple of gems there, but right now the draft is not shaping up to be a particularly good one. They are all either flawed or they’re just not quite the ceiling that you want if you’re going to take a risk on a developmental guy.

Conor Orr: Yeah, and this is a weird time. I think we go in the NFL from, vacillating between being so fat and happy with every quarterback situation being settled, to being dangerously threadbare, and like we’re kind of riding this wave where I think next year only about half of the teams could probably comfortably say that they’re settled at the position. And then beyond that, I mean, we’re going to start to get a little bit of desperation. So here’s what I'll say. I think that if you're one of these teams, what do you do? I think that the stigma of getting rid of one of these quarterbacks after a year is largely gone. The Cardinals took care of that by trading up for Josh Rosen and then getting out and then getting Kyler Murray, and then Lord knows what they’re going to have to do now. But I think that option is there. You go up and you get Malik Willis, you get Picket, you do something like that. If it doesn’t work, you just bounce to the next year. And you’re right up in conversation again. I mean, there’s nothing in anybody’s contract that says that these guys are responsible for them as human beings. It’s just a sad reality that they’re kind of just grabbing at straws and if it doesn’t work, they’re going to toss them aside.

Have a comment, critique or question for a future mailbag? Email themmqb@gmail.com or tweet at @GGramling_SI or @ConorOrr.

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