Tony Sparano Fired: A Tough Decision

I know everybody wants a winner. I know everybody wants a winner now. That particular expectation and pressure, to win in South Beach, is one of the reasons that the actual job or task-at-hand becomes very difficult.

Tony Sparano was a fighter right up till his last days in Miami. He began the season by swallowing his pride as ownership courted the notion of "playing the field," and "seeing what else was out there." Sparano wanted to make it work, virtually ignoring the offseason, concentrating on the job-at-hand and contributing long hours in an attempt to transcend the situation. He reinvented his approach somewhere around the Denver game and the team responded. After an 0-5 start (this seems to be the week when the team finally started to jell), the team went 4-4.

Winning has a particular signature. It is not unlike a musician who can hit the right note. Was Sparano beginning to find the right notes for the Dolphins? It's hard to say. The Eagle game really bought the old optimism meter down a peg or more as the team could not execute in a total team fashion. How much of it was injuries? Was it just a run-of-the-mill bad game, or was it a measuring stick for where the team is at? This again is a very difficult question to answer.

I have been, basically, in Sparano's corner in this season's second half (see my recent articles including THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT), but this is not to say that I don't see the points which are made by the nay-Sayers who have shouted "fire Sparano" for some time now and to "axe Jeff Ireland" along with him!

Why, just a few weeks back, some writers were suggesting that the team go through a major coaching and player overhaul! Having said that, I still find myself asking certain questions today: Did owner Steven Ross see the big picture when he went ahead with the firing? Had Sparano begun to find the winning formula with the second half successes?

Despite earlier mistakes, were the positives that came out of the 2011 draft a sign of things to come for Sparano, Ireland and company? The same regime, who had taken so many hits for some time with their offseason and draft decisions, had finally come up with some gems making the right call with Matt Moore, Kyle Orton, Ronnie Brown, Ricky Williams, Reggie Bush, etc.

So, if I have a problem with the decision (and that's a big, the jury is still out on the decision, "if") it has more to do with the timing then anything else. For whatever the product that Sparano and Ireland were putting together, it was beginning to jell in the second half. I am not sure one bad game erases that. Certainly for some, including the ownership, the jelling was simply taking too long. Had Sparano been given another year at this, I believe that the litmus test on his coaching grade would be complete. As it stands now, I don't give Sparano an "F" or a "D," I give him an "incomplete."

Only time will tell now if ownership made the right call. So much momentum and player solidarity was emerging before the Eagle game that one can only hope the next coach can harness the momentum and build on it, find out what created the second-half victories and keep them coming. Only then will we discover if Steven Ross and company can find the winning signature and hit those notes correctly.