The Dolphins are About to Start Firing Coaches and the Patriots Have Pretty Much Clinched the AFC East

Source – Matt Burke’s outbursts on the sideline made it seem as if his blood pressure reached an all-time high.

The Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator couldn’t hide his frustration watching Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson shred his defense during Thursday night’s 42-23 loss to Houston. …

His performance, and Miami’s struggles on defense for the second straight week, had coach Adam Gase acknowledging that his team needs to reassess everything they are doing on defense.

“We got to get better fast,” Gase said about his 4-4 team. “I’m going to re-evaluated everything this weekend. We got to figure out how to get better on defense and sustain drives and put it in the end zone on offense.”

Well that escalated quickly. As a general rule, when you’re two seasons removed from making the playoffs in your coach’s first year and halfway through his third you’re .500 and talking about wholesale changes because your defense played like they were skating a two-man penalty kill, things are not going according to plan.

For the record, this makes Adam Gase 20-20 in his Dolphins career, with 818 total points scored and a point differential of -174. At the same point in his tenure, Joe Philbin was 20-20, with 816 total points scored and a point differential of +13. He was fired four weeks into the next season. So it should be apparent that someone is going to go in Miami soon. And if it’s not the people in charge of Gase’s defense, it’s going to be the guy in charge of those people.

But what about the rest of the AFC East? Funny you should ask:

Whelp. Like I wrote yesterday, the Bills’ offense isn’t bad; it’s historically bad. Lapping the field when it comes to ineffectiveness in a league where teams have all the defenses of Alderaan.

But maybe there’s one team in a position to make a run at the division, you say? So we should check in on the Jets? Sure. Let’s do it:

Though it’s unfair to them to live in the past. The Minnesota game is in the books. Let’s look ahead, with professional Jets house man Manish Mehta, who makes his living putting a shine on their sneakers. He’ll offer some hope:

Ouch. Remember two months ago when the Patriots were going into the season with what we thought was the worst wide receiver group we’d ever seen? The Jets unit this weekend makes Chris Hogan, Phillip Dorsett and Cordarelle Patterson look like the 2013 Broncos.

And assuming the Patriots manage to eke one out at Buffalo – and they’re 14-point road favorites at the moment – they’ll be two games up on the division with a head-to-head win over 2nd place Miami. As the Dolphins are on the verge of handing some coaches cardboard boxes and telling them security will see them out, the Bills are setting new standards for futility and the Jets casualty rate approaches the Germans at Stalingrad and their rookie QB is combing back to Earth after a promising start.

All of which begs the question: Remember when this was going to be the year the rest of the AFC East “closed the gap” and for the 18th straight summer the question was “who will be the challenger” to the Pats in the division?

Only this summer it seemed things had finally changed. This first month of the season [altogether now] … “felt different.” Gase had gotten rid of his malcontents. There were two rookie quarterbacks coming in to change the dynamic. The Patriots were infighting and and the stars were skipping OTAs and finally starting an uprising against Coach Nofun McGlumface.  And finally they were going sink into 2nd or maybe even 3rd place under the weight of all that drama.

Well as it looks right now, the AFC East did change. It does feel different. Most years New England clinches the division around Thankgiving. In 2018, it’s about to happen before Halloween. That, if you’re in Miami, Buffalo or New York, is what progress looks like. Kiss the rings.