The Dolphins in recent years have had an issue with discipline. New coach Jeff Hafley is changing that. Quickly.
He removed running back Ollie Gordon II from Friday night’s preseason game after Gordon drew an unsportsmanlike conduct foul for flipping the ball at a defender after a play.
“We had an opportunity to continue a drive, and it’s important to me — I’m not a big fan of pre-snap penalties and post-snap penalties like that, those are not acceptable to me,” Hafley said. “It’s disrespectful to the team, it’s selfish, and it’s how you lose games. And you know, I’m not going to play players that can’t control themselves and get us 15-yard penalties and have us go backwards and put our team in a bad position, put our coaches in a bad position. And that’s a big learning lesson.
“I went over it with the team today. Ollie and I had a great conversation again this morning and, you know, hopefully he’ll learn from that and our team will learn from it, but those are the quickest way to lose football games and there’s no place for that. And when I pulled him out, I’m not going to tell you exactly what I said to him, but it was a chance for me to look him in the eye and let him know that that was not OK and that I had to take him out and he had to learn his lesson, because if you’re going to have a standard, there has to be consequences, or then your standard is just a bunch of BS if not.
“So our standard is we’re not going to do things to put our team in jeopardy and have post-snap fouls where we throw a ball at a guy or toss a ball at a guy. Had a good talk with him immediately, pulled him out of the game and eventually let him go back in, but as far as the conversation goes, I’ll just keep it between us, but it was a great time to teach him a lesson, to teach our team a lesson and move on, and move forward with Ollie and the rest of the guys.”
All of that should be music to the ears of Miami fans. It shows that there will be rules, and they will be enforced. There will be expectations, and there will be accountability.
With those things, a football team has a chance. Without them, it doesn’t.
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