Dolphins' Passing Attack Isn't The Only Part Of Miami That Hasn't Traveled Well
The Miami Dolphins' passing attack was much maligned for their shortcomings on the road in 2023. But Miami's road travels did more than interrupt the Dolphins' ability to throw the ball.
If you wait long enough, just about any conversation around football becomes a quarterback conversation. It’s the nature of the beast — as the central figure of a football team, the quarterback is often assumed to be at the epicenter of everything that goes right (or wrong) with a football team. The 2023 Miami Dolphins are no exception. The Dolphins enjoyed a successful but unfulfilling campaign in 2023:
They tied for 1st place in the AFC East (tiebreakers notwithstanding)
They won 11 games, their most since 2008
They made a return trip to the postseason
And they collectively set a few franchise record marks along the way; including a 70-point performance, a single-season touchdown record and a collective effort to set a team record in defensive sacks recorded.
In all, it wasn’t a bad year to root for the Miami Dolphins. The issues that plagued them all season, however, were a large part of their undoing in the end, however. The Dolphins didn’t travel well. Four of the team’s six regular season losses (and five of seven total) came away from Hard Rock Stadium. And Miami’s high-powered offense failed to score more than 20 points in any of those five losses.
It’s become a Tua Tagovailoa conversation. Understandably so, too. But the narratives around the Dolphins have become too Tagovailoa-centric when discussing the team’s performance traveling away from the friendly confines of home.
There’s more afoot than just a young quarterback growing into whatever his final form will be. And some of it is much more damning.
The Dolphins have one of the NFL’s best pass defenses since 2020. Miami’s average Adjusted Net Yards Per Attempt since the start of the 2020 season is 5.50 yards — a mark that is good for 3rd in the NFL over that time period. Miami trails only their AFC East rival from Western New York (Buffalo has a 5.25 ANY/A average at home) and Cleveland (5.28 ANY/A average at home).
What is Adjusted Net Yard Per Attempt? It is a passing efficiency statistic designed to measure and quantify how productive a team is per passing drop back. It is calculated as such:
(PASSING YARDS -- SACK YARDAGE + (20 × TOUCHDOWNS) -- (45 × INTERCEPTIONS)) / (PASS ATTEMPTS + SACKS)
Adjusted Net Yards Per Attempt accounts for passing yards, touchdowns, interceptions and sacks (& their yardage lost) per attempted drop back. It’s much preferable to the more superficial measures of passing production (yardage comes to mind). And touchdowns are, to some degree, random. Not nearly as much as interceptions, but there’s variance in their measurement all the same. This all-encompassing measurement of performance is the equivalence of “process over results”. Except it does factor in the results of a touchdown or an interception, too.
Speaking of those results-based outcomes, Miami’s 38 interceptions of opposing quarterbacks at Hard Rock Stadium since 2020 ranks T-1st in the league with Dallas.
And Miami has yielded just 39 passing touchdowns at home over that same stretch — only the Bills, Seahawks (36 apiece), Giants (35) and Rams (33) have allowed fewer.
The Dolphins have been downright stingy at home. And it shows in the win column, too. The Dolphins, thanks in part to their home field pass defense, are tied for 5th in the NFL in wins at home since 2020 with 24. They trail Buffalo, Green Bay, Dallas and Kansas City over that time.
Pass defense isn’t the statistic to rule them all for the win column, but performing this well over a 4-year sample size at home certainly doesn’t hurt.
What does hurt, however, is the other side of the coin.
Miami’s stellar performances defending the pass at home turn nightmarish when they hit the road. So much so, as a matter of fact, that the team’s average Adjusted Net Yards Per Attempt since 2020 ranks dead last in the league (7.65 ANY/A).
Some of this can always be contextualized by difficulty of schedule and injuries. But we’re talking about a 35 game sample size across four years of play. The Dolphins have had their share of bad luck (drawing the Eagles without both starting cornerbacks in 2023, for example). But everyone deals with those dynamics at one point or another.
And yet no one comes remotely close to the cliff of performance Miami falls off of defending the pass. They’ve had some all-time stinkers too — two of which came this past season against the eventual 1st & 2nd seed in the AFC playoffs.
The Dolphins played at Buffalo in Week 4. The Bills punted once (and scored eight times) across their first nine possessions that day. Bills quarterback Josh Allen posted a perfect 158.3 passer rating thanks to a 21/25 for 320 yards & 4 touchdown performance.
Not to be outdone, the Baltimore Ravens posted 340 yards on 22 attempts with 6 touchdown passes in Week 17.
To credit both teams, each were in the top-8 of the NFL in team ANY/A for the 2023 season. But Miami’s pass defense on the road isn’t just the byproduct of a few nuclear performances that tanked their averages. The Dolphins’ road ANY/A isn’t just the worst in the league since 2020, their net difference in ANY/A allowed on the road is more than 33% worse than the next worst team in home/away performance splits since 2020. That honor goes to the Browns — ranked 2nd in the league in home ANY/A average but 19th in road ANY/A average (6.83 ANY/A).
The Miami Dolphins (orange hexagon) are the only team in the NFL with a home ANY/A average since 2020 under 6.29 ANY/A (14 teams) with a road ANY/A average since 2020 over 7.00.
Only the Las Vegas Raiders (15) have forced less interceptions on the road since the start of the 2020 season than the Dolphins’ 17. Miami’s 59 passing touchdowns allowed in the same stretch is 26th in the league. It is a baffling contrast of performances that, if we’re being honest, hasn’t been talked about at all. The focus, instead, is squarely on the Dolphins’ polarizing quarterback.
But Tagovailoa and the passing offense, clearly, isn’t the only thing that doesn’t travel well for the Dolphins. Putting an explanation in the crosshairs is easier said than done, as well. Miami’s past three seasons have each respectively ranked among the 13 worst individual season home & away splits from an ANY/A perspective among all 128 NFL defensive performances since 2020.
There’s no central theme of scheme or defensive coordinator here, either. As a matter of fact, the issues have transcended both. Brian Flores called the defense in 2021. Josh Boyer called it in 2022. Vic Fangio called it in 2023. Miami’s defense has become gradually less blitz dependent across that 3-season stretch:
2021: 39.6% blitz rate (Flores)
2022: 33.3% blitz rate (Boyer)
2023: 21.5% blitz rate (Fangio)
They’ve ran predominantly middle of the field closed. They’ve ran predominantly middle of the field open. They’ve run exotic pre-snap disguises and they’ve run static defensive shells. And they’ve played a lot of successful passing attacks on the road (four ranked in the top-8 in NFL ANY/A in 2022) and they’ve played very few successful passing attacks on the road (just one ranked in the top-10 in 2021 — the Tampa Bay Buccaneers).
And yet each one of those three seasons was among three of the worst 15 discrepancies since 2020 for a single season unit performing worse on the road.
The Miami Dolphins defenses (in white) have three of top-15 most dramatic single-season home/away ANY/A splits in the NFL since the 2020 season.
The 2022 Miami Dolphins, who played four top-8 passing attacks in ANY/A on the road that season, were tied for the worst single-season gap from home & away defensive ANY/A performance. Miami posted a 5.20 ANY/A allowed at home and a whopping 8.30 ANY/A on the road (+3.10 ANY/A).
The 2021 Miami Dolphins, who played just one top-10 passing attack in ANY/A on the road that season have the 3rd biggest gap from home & away performance — Miami posted a 4.80 ANY/A allowed at home and a 7.80 ANY/A allowed on the road (+3.00 ANY/A).
This past season’s Dolphins? Their +1.90 ANY/A gap was T-13th in the NFL out of 128 defenses. Perhaps the solace Miami can take is that their unit absorbed two stinkers against Baltimore and Buffalo that absolutely bombed whatever other positive performances they posted. (And let’s not forget the 233 rushing yards they allowed in Week 1 on the road against the Chargers, too). The Dolphins need to resolve this issue and at least find themselves relatively close to league average.
The NFL league average since 2020?
Teams have allowed approximately 1 more touchdown pass on the road, had 1 more interception at home and post an average ANY/A that is about a quarter of a point higher (6.36 ANY/A at home versus 6.63 ANY/A on the road).
The Dolphins have only vaguely approached those numbers once over this stretch of time, which happened in 2020 when the team allowed 12 touchdowns versus 10 interceptions and a 6.60 ANY/A at home versus 9 touchdowns and 8 interceptions and a 7.00 ANY/A on the road. That team finished 1st in the NFL in turnovers, 11th in sacks and 6th in scoring defense (despite yielding 56 points in Week 17 to end their season).
If the Dolphins can bridge their three year gap of consistency away from home, the team will be in a much better position to fulfill many of their big-picture aspirations. Better health and offensive performances would certainly help, too. But being among the league’s worst traveling pass defenses certainly bears it’s own weight of the responsibility Miami needs to reconcile. It all fits together — because just as it all doesn’t fall on the shoulders of Miami’s quarterback when the team comes up short in January, fixing the pass defense splits isn’t going to solve all your problems either.
Football is a delicate balancing act of complementary variables interwoven among one another. We can obsess about one singular piece of the puzzle as much as we want — but Miami needs to sew together a number of issues. This defensive travel split stands large among them.
No Super Bowl representative over the course of this study posted a defensive ANY/A worse than 6.60 on the road. Five of the eight teams to play in the championship since 2020 had a better ANY/A on the road than they did at home. The Bengals’ 2021 magical run through the AFC playoffs was not fueled by franchise quarterback Joe Burrow, but rather by a savage defense that posted the 3rd best road versus home split in the NFL since 2020. That certainly came in handy as the 4th seeded Bengals went to Tennessee to upend the Titans in the Divisional Round and to Arrowhead to beat the Chiefs in the AFC Championship.
Lest we forget the Bengals offense drove the length of the field to score a touchdown ONCE in Arrowhead that year. Their only other touchdown of the game came on a drive that started at the Chiefs’ 27 yard-line after a BJ Hill interception.
That same Bengals team drove the length of the field once to score a touchdown in the divisional round, as well — 9 play, 65 yard drive to start the second half against the Titans. Tennessee threw an interception near midfield in the final minute of regulation, setting up Evan McPherson’s 52-yard field goal to push Cincinnati in front, 19-16.
The elephant in the room here for Miami is we’re talking about road performances and playoff wins. The Dolphins have just 3 road playoff wins in franchise history and once since the 1972 AFC Championship Game. It’s a tall task and tall order. Yet while it may be accentuated for Miami as a warm weather team, it is worth acknowledging that road playoff wins are a tall task for just about everyone.
Miami is 3-15 playing road playoff games in the Super Bowl era. Buffalo is 3-14 playing road playoff games in their franchise history during the Super Bowl era. The Broncos, with John Elway & Peyton Manning in all of their brilliance, are 4-10 in franchise history playing road playoff games. Aaron Rodgers has won 2 playoff road games since his Super Bowl run in 2011. Tom Brady’s Patriots collected just 4 playoff road wins in the entirety of the dynasty. Does it help to play all your playoff games at home? Absolutely. But Brady was a .500 quarterback in the playoffs away from Foxborough. (He was 2-4 in New England from 2006-2019).
This all fits together. And Miami’s ability to play complete football in all phases has been insufficient for their big picture hopes and dreams. Talk about the issues with the traveling air show of Miami’s passing attack all you want — the Dolphins also need to shutter opposing passing games better on the road in 2024 if things are going to be any different this upcoming season.
Kyle.. as always, brilliantly researched and definitively presented. Such poor defensive play then forces the offense to press, making things worse. It’s tough to stay with the run game when you’re playing from well behind.