What do the Miami Dolphins need to do to win two in a row?

Written by Matthew Cannata at 12:30 PM EST | Twitter: @PhinManiacs
Although the Miami Dolphins have won three games, they haven’t yet been able to string together two consecutive wins and on Sunday against the Jacksonville Jaguars, they’ll have that chance to make it happen for the first time this season.

“We’ve got to finish games better,” Joe Philbin said. “Obviously, we had an opportunity a couple of weeks ago and lost the game on the second to last play of the game. We’ve got to execute better. We’ve got to finish games better. Certainly, we haven’t done it yet and until we do it’s one of the challenges we’ve got to meet as a football team.”

The team practiced in pads on Tuesday and Philbin has even switched the schedule from last year in an effort to get different results. This year, Monday is the players’ day off and then they practice Tuesday through Thursday with a walkthrough on Friday on Saturday. Philbin is pleased with the schedule changes thus far and plans to keep it that way because he feels it somewhat keeps players fresh later in the week.

“We like bringing them in on Tuesday, so yesterday we did first and second down. Wednesday, we’re going to do a lot of our third down plan and really buy into the day Thursday, they’ve got the whole game plan in their minds anyway, on paper, on their iPads. And now you’ve got 72 hours or so until kickoff and so we hope that the game plan kind of sinks in a little bit better maybe because they have it a little bit earlier.”

Philbin said that it shouldn’t be hard getting the intensity up facing a 1-6 team because on film, the Jaguars have played their opponents tough and haven’t laid down.

 “Some of the results earlier in the year weren’t what they were looking for and a couple scores were maybe not what they were looking to have, but look at the last three games this team has played and that is what we have been talking to the team about. They played Pittsburgh extremely well, you can argue that they should have won the Tennessee game and then they beat a Cleveland team that was playing pretty darn good and beat them by 18 points, so I mean, what happened against Indianapolis way back in September isn’t that relevant right this minute. It’s what you do right now and they are certainly improving.”

Cameron Wake echoed Philbin’s words and included that he didn’t know the solution to winning two in a row, although he did say that with more consistency and by going out there and playing up to their standards and expectations, good things will happen.

“It is consistency. We have to play Miami Dolphin regardless of the situation, regardless of the record, week-in and week-out. I think we’ve shown across the board, any facet of the game, running the ball, we can run the ball, getting to the quarterback, we can do that, stopping the run, we’ve shown that we can do that, throwing the ball, we can do that. We’ve done that all throughout the first six games. But doing it all consistently together, collectively as a unit, I think that’s been some of the issues. Again, this week we’ve been focused on that and I think we’ll go out on Sunday and put that on the field.”

If the Dolphins can make it two in a row on Sunday, they’ll have a good jolt of energy heading into the match-up against the San Diego Chargers on November 2.

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