The Dolphins’ effort to fill those ugly orange seats at Sun Life Stadium is working.
Sort of.
Team president Mike Dee tells Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald that the Dolphins have sold 6,000 new season tickets, with most of that spike coming since the draft.
Dee says that the increase in ticket sales has caused the team to re-evaluate plans to reduce the capacity of the stadium.
The fact that the sales came mainly after the draft means that the decision to draft quarterback Ryan Tannehill may have played a role in the box-office success. Which means that fans will expect to see Tannehill on the field. Which may not happen.
“I’m trying not to put too many grandiose expectations on the kid,” G.M. Jeff Ireland tells the team’s official website, per Jackson. “I think the kid is our future. Obviously, I wouldn’t have drafted him with the eighth pick [otherwise]. I feel like he’s the kind of guy you want in the locker-room, the kind of athlete you want running an offense. But we’ve got two other quarterbacks here that are very established, very good competitors, so it’s not going to be easy for him.”
We still think that the Dolphins could be setting up a phony competition, allowing Tannehill to enter Week One of his rookie season with the boost of confidence that comes from leapfrogging Matt Moore and David Garrard on the depth chart.
Of course, the flaw in that logic could be the notion that leapfrogging Moore and Garrard would actually give Tannehill confidence. And so maybe the purpose of a potentially phony competition is to avoid Tannehill from becoming completely discouraged by his failure to overcome Moore and Garrard on the depth chart.
