Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill will not get his wish of racing Olympic gold medalist Noah Lyles.
Lyles said that he and Hill had agreed to race in what they hoped would be a major event this weekend in New York City, but it has been called off for reasons that Lyles did not fully explain.
“We were very deep into creating the event. In fact, it was supposed to happen this weekend,” Lyles said, via the New York Post. “Unfortunately there were some things, complications, personal reasons that it just didn’t come to pass, but we were full on. We were gonna have a big event, we were going to shut down New York Times Square and everything, we were gonna have all the billboards for the event, it was going to be a lot of fun.”
Hill entered a track meet on Friday and won the 100-meter dash in 10.15 seconds. That’s an outstanding time for someone like Hill, who hasn’t run track competitively since he was in college a decade ago. But it’s a far cry from what Lyles is capable of doing: Lyles won the gold medal in Paris last summer by running the 100 meters in 9.79 seconds.
With NFL season fast approaching, there may not be time to reschedule the Lyles-Hill race while Hill is available. If it ever happens, it’s probably on hold until next year.
The Dolphins announced their schedule for this summer’s training camp on Tuesday.
The team will hold 10 practices that are open to the public at their facility in South Florida. The first of those practices will be on Saturday, July 26 as part of the NFL’s “Back Together Weekend.”
Other open practices will be held on July 28-30, August 1, August 3, August 6, and August 19-21. The practice on August 21 will be a joint practice with the Jaguars ahead of the preseason game between the teams.
In addition to those practices, the Dolphins also announced that their August 2 practice will be open to season ticket holders.
Jonnu Smith did not attend the Dolphins’ mandatory minicamp last week, but that doesn’t mean the tight end will definitely be playing elsewhere this fall.
The Dolphins have talked with other teams about trading Smith because he is looking for a new deal after signing a two-year, $8.4 million contract with the Dolphins before last season. Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel has said the Dolphins aren’t looking to move Smith, but they haven’t given him a new contract so it’s still a possibility.
During an appearance on WSVN on Sunday, Smith’s agent Drew Rosenhaus said the situation is “still fluid.”
“Nothing has been resolved yet,” Rosenhaus said, via C. Isaiah Smalls II of the Miami Herald. “It’s still an ongoing situation.”
Smith was one of the few bright spots for Miami last season with 88 catches for 884 yards and four touchdowns. It will be a little while longer before we know whether he’ll have a chance at an encore.
Dolphins backup quarterback Zach Wilson is on his third NFL team as he heads into his fifth NFL season, which was not the idea when the Jets selected him with the second overall pick in the 2021 NFL draft. But in Miami, Wilson is remembering to enjoy football again, without the pressures he faced and couldn’t live up to in New York.
Wilson said that he feels he can be himself more in Miami, and that has been a major focus of his approach since signing with the Dolphins in March.
“That’s what I’ve tried to do since I went through the entire New York experience, is trying to be more myself and focus on more just enjoying the game, enjoying learning, enjoying the failures, the process, everything that comes with it, not getting too hard on yourself when you make a mistake, just trying to learn and do my best and get better,” Wilson said. “And I think having that focus and that mindset is what’s going to get you to where you want to be, not dwelling over a mistake. Everyone’s just out here trying to help each other get better, especially the coaches. They’re trying to help me be the best player I can be.”
Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel recently described Wilson as, “a guy that has been through some shit and found his way through it.” That’s a good description of what Wilson’s three years with the Jets were like. Now the question is whether at age 25, Wilson can turn his career around and create a bright future for himself in the NFL. He thinks Miami is a place where that journey can start.
The Miami Dolphins have chronically underachieved in recent years. And the constant response is that the culture needs to change.
They’re saying it again. The overriding question is whether they mean it this time.
Based on comments made this week by veteran edge rusher Bradley Chubb, there’s a chance they don’t. Because, as Chubb tells it, they were fibbing last year about embracing change.
“I’m going to say last year, we were lying honestly,” Chubb told reporters. “Point blank, period. We felt it. We put our toe in the water, but we didn’t dive all the way in. We didn’t get all the way there with each other. We weren’t making the effort to go the extra mile and I would say this year, we’re doing that. I’m not sure how it’s going to turn out for us, but we are putting forth that foot to change it because last year, like I said, we said we wanted to change, ‘Yeah, we’re doing this, we’re doing that, but it’s not going exactly how we want to.’ But this year, I feel like everybody has the right mindset and moving forward, so if it works out, it’s going to work out. If it doesn’t, we’re going to get back to the drawing board and make sure it works out.”
They can only go back to the drawing board so many times. At some point, the only way to change the culture is to change the coach.
And the current coach, Mike McDaniel, wishes he’d known that last year’s effort to make things different, and in turn better, wasn’t working.
“It would have been awesome if he would have told me on the front end when they were lying,” McDaniel told reporters. “Beyond that, 2024, unless I’m using it directly for an analogy, I’m much more concerned with 2025. I think you do a lot more for the organization if you spend your time thinking forward in terms of not this, that, or the other, or whose fault it was. ‘No, we want it like this, let’s do it like this and this is who we are.’ I don’t even — what year did you speak of? I guess I’ll read about that in history books.”
So that’s the gimmick this year. They’re forgetting about last year. When the gimmick was to start all the meetings at 24 minutes after the hour, in reference to the fact that it had been 24 years since the team’s last playoff win. (Actually, that’s a pretty good reason to forget about 2024.)
So what are the players doing differently this year — and not lying about this time?
“It’s not necessarily him changing,” Chubb said regarding McDaniel. “It’s more about us, man, about how we accept what he’s telling us. Like he may have a joking way of getting a serious point across, but it’s up to us in the room to be like, ‘Okay, he might have said it funny, but at the end of the day, this is what we’re doing and this is how we’re moving about it and as a team, this is what we’re going to do.’ So not much of him has changed. I would say the people around him and the buy-in of the players that he wants has changed and guys are taking accountability of how we want it to look out here because he can only do so much in terms of with the game plan, the team meetings and all that, prepping and putting us in the right position; but we’ve got to go out there and execute. So I wouldn’t say he’s changed. I would say the mindset around him and around the team has changed.”
Maybe it has. Maybe it will. It would be foolish to assume change is coming for the Dolphins until it does. McDaniel is trying to make change happen by demanding more accountability.
“I think some of the non-negotiables were the football program has to focus on football,” McDaniel said. “For that to happen, there’s a lot of things that can’t dominate people’s time, which is like, first and foremost, being on time. Being accountable to each other and staying to the rules or feeling very open as a team that, hey, it’s OK to call someone out when they deserve to be called out, and for those people, it’s OK to be called out as long as you change your [expletive] behavior.”
But when does it ever work that anyone in a position of authority — coach, teacher, boss, whatever — has demonstrated a very unique and authentic style for multiple years and then changes in a way that the players, students, workers, whatever will take seriously? For McDaniel, it will be hard to suddenly counter three years of not demanding basic things like players being on time.
Maybe McDaniel can pull it off as he enters year four. But, as Chubbs tells it, the effort to change the culture in his third year didn’t take. That’s reason enough to be skeptical that things will be different in 2025.
And that the culture could change very dramatically in 2026.
