The Buffalo Bills host the Miami Dolphins on Thursday night at Highmark Stadium get Week 3 started with a classic AFC East rivalry game. It’s the last time the division-leading Bills play the Dolphins in their current stadium before moving across the street in 2026, which should have Bills Mafia at full roar in its “goodbye for now” chant.
But calling the Dolphins a “rival,” given the relationship between the two teams recently, it feels slightly disingenuous. Yes, there’s a long and storied history between Buffalo and Miami, of course. It’s been famous for its streakiness.
The Dolphins famously won 20 consecutive games between the two teams in the 1970s. Buffalo, on the other hand, has won 12 out of the last 13 matchups with Miami. And in the same way that Miami’s dominance in the 1970s represented a divergence between the two teams in organizational competence (the Bills had just three winning seasons in that decade while the Dolphins had just one losing season), the current iterations of the two teams also highlights the differences in team building philosophies for each team.
The Dolphins have a General Manager in Chris Grier who has presided over the team’s roster building since 2016. His nine years in the chair mark the longest tenure in NFL history for a GM whose team does not have a playoff win. Grier has hired Adam Gase, Brian Flores, and Mike McDaniel as head coaches for the franchise, overshooting the general standard of a general manager getting two head coach hires before getting dismissed themselves in an organizational sweep.
Grier also selected Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa with the fifth overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft, “successfully” completing the “Tank for Tua” philosophy popular amongst many fans during the 2019 season. Notably, he bypassed Oregon quarterback Justin Herbert, selected immediately after by the Los Angeles Chargers at sixth overall.
After a rocky start to the Tua Era in Miami, Grier brought in San Francisco 49ers whiz-kid Mike McDaniel, a man with a reputation for creative schemes behind many of the Kyle Shanahan offenses during his time with the Niners, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Washington. For a brief amount of time, the McDaniel/Tua union looked like it was the answer for the Dolphins.
In 2022, Tua combined with all-star receiver Tyreek Hill, first round pick Jaylen Waddle, and McDaniel to concoct one of the most potent offenses in the league. He ranked in the top three in many major quarterback metrics, though, unfortunately, his multiple concussions marred an otherwise hopeful season. “Is he any good” was replaced by “if he can stay on the field, this is a dynamic offense” as the go-to catch phrase for Dolphins fans. The vibes were good, confidence was high, and the idea that the Bills would be short-lived as kings of the AFC East wasn’t foreign to many a Fins faithful.
But a funny thing happened on the way to that elusive Miami playoff victory.
Bills General Manager Brandon Beane likes to say that he’s not collecting talent; he’s building a team. And the way the Dolphins went about building their team is reflected in the problems that now plague the organization as they limp into Buffalo 0-2 on the season and with rumors of a complete house cleaning percolating through the fan base.
Miami hitched their wagon to a quarterback in Tua Tagovailoa who excels in rhythm and on his first read. Tagovailoa is an accurate thrower of the football to all levels of the field and his overall ball placement when throwing from a solid platform remains a high point in his game. He also entered the league with some injury concerns after a dislocated hip and posterior wall fracture at Alabama.
There’s nothing wrong with deciding on a player like this as you franchise quarterback. Jared Goff doesn’t make plays out of structure at a high level either and he’s been a very effective signal-caller for the Detroit Lions in recent years despite being discarded by the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for Matthew Stafford. Joe Flacco had a career resurgence in 2023 under Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski and has been one of the most structure-bound, immobile quarterbacks to see postseason success in the last 15 years.
But if you make the decision to invest in a player like Tua, this means a specific type of team needs to be built around him. First, you should make sure your offensive line is right. Strike one for Miami. The Dolphins have frequently ranked in the bottom half of the league in many offensive line rankings, leading to even more potential contact exposure for an injury-plagued quarterback.
After telling the media that they were more worried than he was about the team’s offensive line going into the 2024 season, Grier admitted at the beginning of the 2025 calendar year that investments would need to be made in that area of the team. But it’s been too little, too late for the Dolphins, whose offensive line issue bleeds in naturally to their second major team-building flaw: the lack of a competent downhill running game.
The idea that the Dolphins are a finesse team without the physicality necessary to hang with tougher teams may start in the trenches, but having a quarterback like Tua and a head coach like McDaniel (himself not exactly providing an aura of toughness in a leadership position) means that greater emphasis must be placed elsewhere on the team to ensure that the physicality box is checked. But the Dolphins instead decided that speedster and notably undersized Devon Achane would be the centerpiece of their rushing attack. Achane is a great and dynamic player who will likely continue to make big plays for the team, but it’s yet another lean into “small, slight, and speedy” that has shown a lack of balance in team building philosophy for Miami.
This philosophy isn’t just confined to the offense, though. The Dolphins may field the worst starting secondary in football in a league that’s focused on passing and stopping the pass, getting into barn-burner games with the Drake Maye-led New England Patriots and forcing the aforementioned injury-prone quarterback into more pure drop back situations with a substandard offensive line.
It’s all connected. Grier selected their quarterback. He selected their head coach. And then he didn’t build a complementary team around them. The Dolphins consistently chose speed and accuracy over power and physicality at every opportunity.
They can now lament their lack of success, but the truth is that this team is functioning as intended.
There’s a juxtaposition between this example with the Dolphins and the team-building machinations we’ve seen at play during Sean McDermott and Brandon Beane’s tenure (Beane having a nearly identical length of time to Grier’s in Miami). To start, a large portion of the Bills’ success is simply due to them picking the right quarterback. Josh Allen can make a lot of general managers looks smarter than they otherwise would, and Beane has flaws, misses, and things he (and the fan base) wish he would have done differently.
But he chose a raw quarterback and then built the team as if he knew he had a raw quarterback. He brought in veterans on offense so as to avoid having developing offensive pieces around a developing quarterback, allowing him to isolate the variable with Allen while he grew from a player with too few college passing attempts into an MVP-level player.
McDermott brought in veteran leaders so it didn’t force Allen into a leadership role right away. Beane recognized that Allen needed a true #1 separator at the receiver position to take the next step in his development and acquired Stefon Diggs in a trade with the Minnesota Vikings. The team knew they had a bucking bronco at quarterback who was used his role as Superman during every play at Wyoming — and they knew how dangerous it could be long-term if that mindset continued, so they prioritized the offensive line and hired respected offensive line coach Aaron Kromer to smashing success.
Yes, Allen is simply a better player than Tagovailoa and, yes, McDermott is a better head coach than Mike McDaniel. But the Bills made team building decisions that made sense in creating a balanced identity while maximizing the probability that their quarterback would be successful. The Dolphins didn’t.
So here we are.
…and that’s the way the cookie crumbles. I’m Bruce Nolan with Buffalo Rumblings. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram
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