I will comment my reaction below, so you can look down there for that. Here is what he sent me:
"Not much going on this time of year, so I figured I would revisit an old subject and take a look back on the impact of Bill Parcells with the Miami Dolphins.
When Bill first arrived I thought he was exactly what this team needed. We were such a mess before that time. No free agents wanted to come here, and some of the players had given up on winning and only playing for themselves and their numbers. I can remember Parcells in the sky box watching his new team in the last game of the 07 season along with Ron Wolff. I thought, "Oh boy, most of these guys on the field are going to playing elsewhere next year."
Bill really did come in and clean house so to speak, didn't he? He brought in a football mentality that the Dolphins had been missing for a long time. What I mean by a football mentality is a no nonsense logical thought process, or so I thought.
Things went along pretty well for a while, everything they were doing made sense. They drafted the best player in the draft in Long. Nothing wrong with that! They retooled a broken offensive line, when they saw they needed a QB and Pennington became available they jumped on him. In that first year he turned this franchise into a place where FAs could see that things had changed down in Miami. I thought that is exactly what this team needed, but there were things none of us knew about.
We didn't know he selected Tony Sparano as his figure head and installed his guys (Parcells' not Sparano's) as his assistants. It appeared to us that these were Tony's selections, but they were not. Didn't we all think that Ireland and Sparano were being groomed by Parcells? The truth is, Parcells was doing everything, and a few of those things were huge mistakes.
He surrounded himself with familiar faces in place of the best people. He choose Sparano over Rex Ryan because he knew Tony would take a back seat and allow Bill to coach silently. The same was true with Ireland. He left a broken in house scouting team intact, except for 2 out of the 8 scouts. Every point I have made have came back to bite this team. Parcells put people in charge and then handcuffed them from making any decisions.
You can't do that in the business world, and you can't do that in the football world, it doesn't work. We saw a total breakdown of that philosophy last year. When the dust cleared we found that, once again, the Dolphins made a mistake at the top of their ladder. Bill Parcells should have been brought in here as the head coach and GM. I'm sure he would have succeeded in that role. Now, after of all the good things that had began here it went back to this. "No free agents want to come here, and some of the players had given up on winning." In all honesty I can't say that no free agents want to come here, it's just a feeling that I have. But there was no doubt this team had fallen apart at the end of the year."
Thank you everyone for reading, and be sure to check out the comments below.
