The Miami Dolphins were plagued by a variety of issues on offense

The Miami Dolphins only had 249 yards of total offense, averaging a measly 4.5 yards per play. There weren’t a lot of long plays for the team but when there were, they were negated by senseless, but questionable, penalties. It seemed like a perfect storm for everything to go wrong and after the first half, everything went downhill from there.

“I agree, I think we started the second half – I think we only had one accepted penalty in the first half, if I’m not mistaken, and it might have been on that long play you were talking about,” Joe Philbin said. “And then, I want to say, if I’m not mistaken, on the first possession of the second half we had three, I believe. It’s, again, that’s not a good way. We’ve got to come out of the locker room better. It certainly did not help us one bit.”

The Dolphins drove down the field to begin the fourth quarter but were unable to convert it into a touchdown. Philbin said that was a big turning point in the game for them.

“Yeah, that was big. Absolutely. Like you said, I think – again, there was penetration on a run, you have a negative run, you have a penalty, you have a sack, you have three negative plays on that possession. It’s tough. It’s not good. We were thinking, if we moved the ball forward, we were going to treat it as four down territory. Then we started going backwards. We thought that’s what it was going to be.”

Daryn Colledge said a lot of the problems were because of the too many mistakes, which led to them being put in a position where they weren’t able to effectively run the ball because it didn’t make sense.

“I thought we got in a situation where we actually made too many mistakes and put ourselves in a position where we couldn’t run the ball. We came out there on that one drive, obviously, had three penalties in one drive. We kill ourselves like that. You take a sack here and there and all of the sudden you’re forcing yourself into second and longs and third and longs. You’re not going to run the ball out of those situations. We need to stay in positive field position and allow ourselves to run the ball. That’s what we did in the first half. We allowed ourselves to get a couple of drives and a couple of scores. Then, we got away from that. We started letting their defense play downhill and again you can’t allow a defense like that to do that.”

Mike Wallace talked about having the momentum early in the game but then after the Ravens ran the two minute drill to score a touchdown to end the second half, that changed the tide of things and the Dolphins weren’t able to get that momentum back in their hands. In terms of pass protection, Wallace wasn’t sure how big of an issue that was.

“Yeah, I don’t know. I’m running down the field, playing; so it’s kind of hard for me to … I’m not like you all, I’m not watching so I can’t analyze the game like that, I’m playing football. I don’t know; we lost the game; we gave up some sacks, like you said. We still had our chances to win the football game besides that. Like I said, they had the momentum the whole time, we never got it back. We got to some things better.”

Ryan Tannehill said that they were confident in the position they were in, even down by 8 points. He said that in the huddle, everyone was ready to score but things just didn’t work out.

Colledge summed it up perfectly with a summary of the game and everything that went wrong for the Dolphins offense.

“I thought the offensive line did a great job in the first few series. I thought we were in a situation where we kind of had them reeling backwards and we settled for a field goal on the first drive, which I thought we had a chance to score seven there. We came back on the second drive and scored the seven. [After] the first two drives, we’re up 10-0 and we’re where we want to be. From that point on, we kind of let it slip away. We weren’t matching what they were doing. Then, we really only got the ball one more time before the half was over. They scored. They came out. We had the ball back in our hands and a chance to get the momentum back and we did. We came out on the very first drive. I had a penalty on the first play. We had a bad second play. We got a penalty on the third play. The next thing you know, I believe we’re at second and 752 yards it felt like. It’s one of those things where you’re not going to run the ball out of those series. By the time we’re late in the game we’re down two scores and we’re not running the ball anymore then. I think we really only had three good opportunities to do something in the second half and we didn’t capitalize on that and they did. You can’t play behind when the defense is as good as theirs.”

This story was written by Matthew Cannata. Follow him on Twitter: @PhinManiacs

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