Kelly: Dolphins must turn up the volume on team’s physicality

Football is a physical game, one that’s so violent it’s one of the two major sports that features every player adorned by helmets and body armor.

At the core of the game it’s about one man imposing his will, and strength on another, and one team doing the same to another each and every game day.

That’s why the damage done in the battles that happen in the trenches every snap are often compared by the lineman to how the body feels if it had gotten into a weekly car crash.

So everything we’ve seen up to Monday’s first Miami Dolphins padded training camp practice has been the equivalent to flag football, or as others call it, “football in shorts and shirts,” or “football in pajamas.”

“Everything,” Dolphins offensive tackle Kendall Lamm said when asked what changes when the pads come on at this stage of training camp, which can’t happen till after five days of on the field work. “I can’t grab anything now. That rah-rah and everything else…. We run power [runs] and I have to see you bump your chest out when you run [to the ball].

“When I climb to Duke [Riley] I can actually grab Duke,” said Lamm, who is entering his 10th and final NFL season with Miami. “All that bulls--t where my hand slips off, I don’t do that [Monday].”

And Lamm was right, the tone of practice shifted a bit once pads entered the equation. You can hear the clanging of pads, which that’s what football sounds like.

Pads typically neutralized all the little shifty players, the speedsters that typically slow down when they are wearing 20 pounds or armor. And it turns up the volume on practice’s physicality.

“Anybody can make plays without the pads, especially [since] it’s easier to get through a block. It’s easier to call a hold,” linebacker David Long said. “When the pads come on, you just get an idea of how a player is, how aggressive they are, just the play style.”

The Mike McDaniel’s Dolphins, which have a finesse reputation because of the team’s emphasis on speed, needs to turn that volume on to MAX this training camp because Miami must change the team’s identity if they intend to become a legitimate Super Bowl contender in 2024.

The Dolphins were exactly that last season until the games became more physical in December, which explains part of the reason Miami lost three of the season’s final five games before getting owned by the Kansas City Chiefs in the playoffs.

No matter how good your quarterback is, football is a game that is won and lost in the trenches, and unfortunately for the Dolphins, this is a problem that surfaces to the top every December and January, when the NFL stops playing fantasy football, and starting playing playoff football, which is a more physical brand of ball.

That’s why the Baltimore Ravens pushed Miami around in that AFC showdown on Dec. 31, pulling off a 56-19 win that sealed up the No. 1 seed, and Lamar Jackson’s second MVP win.

That game was a winner-take-all moment for the Dolphins, but John Harbaugh’s team pulled their Deebo act from the cult classic movie Friday and took Miami’s bike, and had no plans of giving it back.

The Buffalo Bills have annually bullied the Dolphins too, and this goes back much further than McDaniel’s tenure. Hell, the Bills have been bullying the Dolphins since Dan Marino’s days, and it comes down to the physicality edge they feature.

That comes from how you build your team - coaches and players - and the attitude instilled.

McDaniel’s team needs to find a way to adapt a punch first mentality to change the Dolphins’ finesse, and soft reputation, which new safety Jordan Poyer brought up when he said his new team was viewed as a squad that would fold if adversity hit.

“Last year’s team is different than [this] year’s team in a lot of different ways, including having [Poyer] on the team,” cornerback Jalen Ramsey said. “We’ve got to build our identity. We got to go through of a lot of things during this camp, a lot of growing pains, hopefully some adversity, maybe even a couple of fights, and good things like that to bring us closer. So we’ll see where it leads us.”