‘Opponent that we have to overcome is ourselves.’ Mental errors continue to hurt Dolphins

Death by 1,000 paper cuts.

That’s how Alec Ingold described how the Miami Dolphins offense’s propensity for mental mistakes has negatively impacted the season.

“It’s like death by 1,000 paper cuts right now,” Ingold said Monday. “And it’s like, “Man, we were able to overcome so many of those situations in past years.’ But that hasn’t been the case this season.”

At first, it was the presnap penalties that occurred as quarterbacks struggled to nail down the timing of motions during Tua Tagovailoa’s stint on injured reserve. Then came the penalties on the offensive line as the unit continued to gel. And most recently, it was snap issues, one of which led to safety that ended up being the difference-maker in the Dolphins’ 28-27 loss to the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday. So as much as the volatile quarterback situation after Tagovailoa’s concussion could be blamed for the 2-5 record, so can the offense’s self-inflicted wounds.

“The biggest opponent that we have to overcome is ourselves, really, each and every week,” coach Mike McDaniel said Monday. “If we can do the little things that it takes to win football games, all you have to do is be the best football team on that day, in that stadium and then things will take care of itself.”

After six games with very little to no snapping issues, the Dolphins had two mishandled snaps against the Cardinals. The first occurred in the first quarter when Tagovailoa was under center. Luckily, he quickly recovered the ball without a loss of yardage. The second was in the third quarter with the Dolphins at their own 13 and led to a safety. Up 10 with just more than six minutes left, the Dolphins came out in the pistol formation. Though center Aaron Brewer put the ball a bit high, it could have been caught.

“I think if you ask both of them, [Brewer] would say he should have taken a little steam off of it, and Tua said he should have caught it,” McDaniel said Sunday. “The bottom line is backed up, we can’t have those type of issues. You can’t just give free points to people, so collectively, I think the way I like to handle it is, all right, we can’t go in shotgun or pistol backed up until you guys tell me you can.”

McDaniel was right as both players took responsibility Sunday.

“I got to catch the ball,” Tagovailoa said. “That’s it.”

Added Brewer: “It hit him in hands but it was probably too much heat so that’s on me. I got to take a little bit of heat off the ball.”

The botched center-to-quarterback exchanges occurred just a week after Ingold and Raheem Mostert each fumbled during the Dolphins’ 16-10 loss to the Indianapolis Colts. And while they both protected the ball a lot better against the Cardinals, two additional fumbles on the Dolphins’ first scoring drive — one by Tagovailoa on a sack near midfield and the other by tight end Julian Hill on the goal line — could have been detrimental if the offense didn’t recover them.

“Eliminate the negatives, the penalties, the [mental errors],” Terron Armstead said. “As long as we can eliminate those or minimize those, our production has been there on film, but a lot of our best games have come back from penalties and the negatives so if we can eliminate those and continue to progress with our technique, I like where we are.”

Although Armstead said that in reference to his position group, it’s a statement that could certainly be applied to the entire offense. The Dolphins truly are a few mental errors away from being 4-3 instead of 2-5. That, however, is why football is called a game of inches because one seemingly minute detail could be the difference in a record above or below .500.

“The things that have kept us from winning some of these games are some of the things that we went into the season focused on and we knew we had to work through,” McDaniel said, later adding “We’re not too far off based upon from being able to challenge any team we play each and every week.”