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In fact, I feel like after how Mike McDaniel’s Dolphins took the Broncos to the woodshed, it’d be ridiculous for me to consider the idea that Miami could, in fact, be approaching that rarified air.
It's not just the team’s 70–20 win over Denver, either. It’s how the Dolphins outgunned the Chargers in the opener, and how they grinded out a win in Foxborough last week, and how this week’s avalanche of yards and first downs and points was preceded by flashes to indicate an explosion might be coming.
But it still would’ve been bizarre to predict what we got Sunday, when Miami became the first NFL team to score 70 points in a game since November 1966—two months before the first Super Bowl. They broke team records for points, touchdowns, total yards, rushing yards, and second-half points. Their 70 points tied the 1950 Rams for the third-most in a game in NFL history. Their 726 yards were second, behind only a 735-yard effort from the 1951 Rams.
Just as wild—there wasn’t a defensive or special-teams touchdown as part of it, and most of the team’s 10 touchdowns were scored as a result of sustained drives, with those scoring possessions entailing 75, 81, 75, 86, 3, 90, 77, 7, 68 and 75 yards, respectively.
“I mean, we’ve always thought that the only people that can beat ourselves is us,” Dolphins tailback Raheem Mostert said after getting home Sunday night.
And for the Dolphins, that actually isn’t just a clichéd thing to say.
Mostert also told me that when looking back at last year, the guys on offense in Miami felt like one of the few things that did consistently slow them was a few more pre-snap penalties than the Dolphins should’ve gotten. So in the spring and in training camp, they drilled getting lined up properly fast, which would cut down on those flags, while also allowing for a team that motions more than any even more time to play that game.
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It's probably a good reason why the whole operation looks as smooth as it does, and why the ball is out of Tua Tagovailoa’s hand so quickly consistently—the tighter the operation, the more likely the play goes as planned from the jump.
That operation is now, without question. Sunday’s game was the first 350/350 game in NFL history (the Dolphins threw for 376 and ran for 350). Mostert scored four times, Tyreek Hill went for 157 yards and a touchdown, rookie dynamo De’Von Achane ran for 203 yards and two touchdowns, and, making all this even more mind-bending, Jaylen Waddle didn’t even play against the Broncos. The Dolphins’ final points came with 8:01 left.
That gave them a good crack at breaking the scoring record of 73 points, set by the 1940 Bears. McDaniel would later tell reporters he didn’t go for the record because it wouldn’t have happened in the natural flow of the game, and he felt like he’d bring bad karma on himself by running up the score.
And besides, by then, the point had long since been proven.
Afterwards, McDaniel addressed his players with : “Call a spade a spade, that’s a historic victory. O.K., and what I want you guys to understand and take from it is, it’s about our standard and nothing else, O.K.? Offensively, we put up some historic numbers today, because you didn’t give a f— about the scoreboard. … We care about our standard. And our standard only.”
That standard, on Sunday, just happened to be historically high.
We’ll have more on that in The MMQB Lead later this morning.
