When I woke up Monday morning to see that Myles Garrett had requested a trade from the Cleveland Browns, the team that spent a first overall pick on him in 2017, my first thought was;
“How can I make this about the Dolphins?”
My need for a blog that performs well CEO-wise aside, I don’t think that it’s out of the question that the Miami Dolphins could be a player when it comes to where Garrett ends up. I’ll attempt to convince you that this is a realistic possibility or at least spin an entertaining thread in the process.
If you’ve been abstaining from watching Garrett’s tenure with the Browns (and given their 53-78-1 record over that time period, who could blame you?), then you’ve missed out on one of the most dominant defensive ends in the league. In his rookie season, he posted 7 sacks for the hapless zero-win 2017 squad, but since then, he’s had double-digit sacks in every season, with a career-high of 16 in both 2021 and 2022. He’s put up 14 in each of the past two seasons. In total, Garret has tailed 102.5 sacks in 8 years, with little sign of slowing down.
Mike McDaniel places an extremely high value on the defensive end position in the modern NFL. In a memorable media availability back on September 1st, 2022 he said
“I think the more quality guys you have, the fresher they can play, the more issues they give you offensively because now you’re preparing for six different pass rush moves instead of two that a particular player has, those type of things, and then they can play fresher during the game and it’s just such an incredibly important position that I’m all for that. If I could go and use – I mean, you’d have to talk me out of not trying to pitch to Chris (Grier) to draft a defensive lineman or edge every year because it’s that valuable.”
He knows that the key to disrupting the pass-heavy game of today and containing the more mobile quarterbacks is getting pressure without having to sacrifice men in coverage.
We’ve seen this line of thinking on full display in the three seasons he’s been the Dolphins head coach. In 2021, the team drafted the supremely talented but often injured Jalen Phillips out of the University of Miami. When healthy, Philips has been nothing short of a star, tallying 23 sacks in 26 career games.
Then, in 2022, before the trade deadline, the Dolphins sent the Denver Broncos Chase Edmunds, a first-round and a fourth-round pick in exchange for former first-round pick Bradley Chubb. Chubb has posted 13.5 sacks since joining the team, more than a third of his career total, and before he was injured late in 2023 (an injury that would cause him to miss all of 2024), he was an extremely important contributor to the defensive side of the ball.
Then, in 2024, the team drafted Chop Robinson out of Penn State, who, after a slow start, really began to put everything together down the stretch, notching six sacks and a 19% win rate, good for 11th best for edge rushers.
I know you think these stats are well laid out, but it would be crazy for the Dolphins to make such a bold move. I agree that it would be crazy, but given the lack of playoff success after their significant rebuild, McDaniel and Chris Grier need to embrace the craze.
I believe that it is likely this season will be the last for one, if not both, of them, in their respective roles, should Miami once again fail to win a playoff game in the 2025 season. Grier, for his part, has never been one to shy away from the flashy move. Be it the Laremy Tunsil trade that kicked off the rebuild, the blockbuster Chubb trade listed above or the move to bring Tyreek Hill to Miami, Grier embraces flash. It just so happens that “Flash” is one of the nicknames Garrett goes by.
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