Miami Dolphins faithful wore their frustrations just like head coach Mike McDaniel during Thursday night’s 28-6 blowout loss to the Baltimore Ravens: on their sleeves.
At multiple points during the loss, Dolphins fans booed the home squad, including jeers directed at the coach. Prime Video showed shot after shot after shot after shot of Miami fans with paper bags or even popcorn bowls over their heads — the universal sign of “we’re embarrassed about the team we love.” When the Ravens went up 28-6 in the third quarter, many didn’t even bother booing. They just left the stadium.
Following the loss, an embattled McDaniel was asked how he takes fans booing his 2-7 club.
“Yeah, personally, you want to dictate the terms. You want to fix stuff, and yeah, it sucks. That sucks,” he said, via the team’s official transcript. “All of that does. But I think it’s a pretty consistent formula of fans enjoy winning, and so our expectation is that we have to do the work and do the right things for fans to enjoy the experience, and unfortunately, we didn’t do that tonight, so we got to get back to work to give them something to cheer about.”
Like the fans, McDaniel couldn’t always keep his emotions bottled up, and he poured out his frustration several times on the sideline, from a dejected skyward-looking query to a blowup after a false start by right tackle Larry Borom on a would-be fourth-down play.
“That was at self-inflicted wounds,” the coach said of his sideline reaction to the false start. “We have been putting such an emphasis on all things related to our operation and in a critical fourth-and-1, where we were pretty fired up about the defensive look — it was what we were calling the play for. And that’s, flat out, a controllable that our team knows that keeps you from winning. So I was irate at nothing but our self-inflicted wound.”