Six days after Jeff Fisher spurned the Dolphins, the team has a trio of finalists for the gig.
The potential winner will be Broncos offensive coordinator Mike McCoy, Packers offensive coordinator Joe Philbin, and Dolphins interim head coach Todd Bowles. (So much for those reports that owner Stephen Ross plans to hire a “superstar” coach.)
Actually, we agree with the idea of trying to find the next big thing before he becomes the next big thing. But how does a team cast a wide net and toss out all but three fish in such a short time? The fact that the guy who was on Tony Sparano’s staff and who finished the year with the job ended up as one of the final three makes us wonder about the overall breadth of the search.
Omar Kelly of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel looks at the qualifications of the three finalists. Missing from the analysis is something that no one can presently answer: How these men would perform as a full-time head coach.
Bowles has some experience given that he was given the whistle once Sparano got the shoe. But it’s one thing to play out the string; it’s another to be the coach throughout the offseason, training camp, preseason, and into the regular season. And so the challenge for Ross, G.M. Jeff Ireland, and consultant Carl Peterson will be to determine based on a variety of tangible and primarily intangible factors whether McCoy or Philbin or Bowles is the best man for the job.
Though one of them may indeed be, we’d love to know how those three ended up being the final three of a universe of potential possibilities.
Beyond that, our guess is that Philbin will get the job, and that the Dolphins will throw some of the money that would have been paid to Fisher to Packers backup quarterback Matt Flynn.
