The new regime in Miami, which came from Green Bay, made a beeline for Packers backup quarterback Malik Willis in free agency. Now that the Dolphins have opened their offseason program, new coach (and former Packers defensive coordinator) Jeff Hafley had a message for Willis.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a great conversation with him yesterday,\u201d Hafley told reporters on Tuesday, \u201che came to [the] office. I said, \u2018Don\u2019t change who you are.\u2019 I said, \u2018Don\u2019t put any extra pressure on yourself. You\u2019ve earned the right to be here and have this opportunity, and you\u2019ve done that by doing all the things the right way \u2014 don\u2019t change that. Don\u2019t press, just be you.\u2019 <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I want to make sure that he understands that. It doesn\u2019t have to be perfect. There\u2019s going to be mistakes made, but I want him to play with that confidence and I want him to play the way he\u2019s always done it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Willis has played well when his number has been called over the past two seasons. Beyond that, Hafley has been able to study him in practice and elsewhere. He and G.M. Jon-Eric Sullivan (a former Packers exec) had much more to go on than the film of his games with the Packers. The fact that they moved quickly to sign him shows that they believe in him.<\/p>\n
That makes it easier to believe that the Dolphins could be in the early stages of turning the team around \u2014 and perhaps of ending a streak of years without a playoff win that dates back to the 2000 season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new regime in Miami, which came from Green Bay, made a beeline for Packers backup quarterback Malik…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":573123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-573122","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-nfl","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/573123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}