Kevin Coyle says the first half for the Miami Dolphins was a bad dream

It was a weird game on Monday night when the Miami Dolphins went into MetLife Stadium to take on the New York Jets. Many had expected them to roll in and blow the Jets out but what happened as soon as the ball was kicked off was a completely different story. 

The Jets started on offense by running the ball over and over and over again. In fact, they rushed for over 200 yards in the first half and had over 100 in the first quarter alone. What was going on with the defense and what was Kevin Coyle trying to do to stop the bleeding?

“It was like a bad dream. To give you a summary of how I’m looking at it right now, having gone back and having watched it a couple of times now, number one, they hit three reverses, each of them about 20 yards a piece. The first one got us, it was early in the game, I think it was the second play in the game. Then they had the long run where we missed tackles. It was a heck of a run, that guy has done that before, but we can’t miss tackles. We missed at least three tackles on the play which would have been a five-yard gain, it turned into a 40-somtheing-yard gain. Then they hit, one of the reverses was a second and long, the grouping that they had in the game had been a passing grouping and we anticipated, it was second-and-10 actually, and I called a blitz, which didn’t put us in a great situation against the reverse. That one got out on us. It was like, geez, they had some good timely calls, we didn’t. So that put us behind the eight ball.”

Coyle talked about the fact that the Jets were able to get many extra plays due to penalties, extended drives and so forth in the first half. In addition, he said that despite everything, the Dolphins still did some good things on defense.

“When you look at the stats, you can twist at them any way you want. I’m, not going to defend the fact that we gave up 210 yards in the first half. With that being said, they had 25 additional carries in the first half. They ran the ball almost every play of the game. They had 105 yards for the remaining 25 carries, which was a 4.2 yard average, which was a half a yard less averaging going into the game. They were averaging 4.7. They’re one of the better running teams in the league to start out with. When you combine the rest of the game, with the three reverses and the missed tackles on the other play out of the equation, they got 45 carries for 172 yards for 3.8 yard average.”

However, Coyle said that you can’t just take things on surface level as it goes much deeper than that. Coyle promised to work on everything that plagued the Dolphins on Monday night and promises that they will get better. 

“Now, you can’t dismiss those plays. But what I’m trying to point out is, nothing is as good as it seems, nothing is as bad. We weren’t as bad as what comes off initially. We’ve got to fix some of the things that we need to fix in our run game, in terms of our run fits, in terms of dealing with some of these reverses. The Jets had nothing to lose as you know, so they came out and they did some things that they hadn’t shown. They had run reverses, but not out of the actions that they showed last night. It’s all part of the process. The best news I can say is, at the end of the day, we gave up 13 points.”      
This story was written by Matthew Cannata. Follow him on Twitter: @PhinManiacs

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