Wow- I don’t think I’ve ever come so close to having a heart attack.  The amount of ways that we tried to give this game to Jacksonville was stunning.    Over and over again, when we had a chance to slam the door on them, we gave them hope- two fumbles in field goal range, and missed 38 yard field goal (the first missed FG inside the 40 for Dan Carpenter’s career), and a bad interception thrown by Henne all contributed to make a game that should have been a double digit blow out into a 4 point squeaker.

There are a couple of ways to look at this.  The pessimist will say that this is a sign that the Dolphins are pretenders.  Jacksonville is far from being a top NFL team, and we just could not put them away when we had everything on the line.

The optimist will say that this is the mark of a great team- a team that can have all the breaks go against them, and still find a way to pull out the win.  Honestly, I’m not sure what I believe, but the nature of most of the issues makes me lean towards the latter.  Having four fumbles in a single game seems to me to be more of an anomaly than something that will happen on a regular basis.  Henne’s interception was kind of a bummer- he really had no business throwing the ball that way.  Actually, he had no business throwing the ball period.  The Dolphins were in full on clock killing mode, and really should just have been running the clock and trying to play field position - especially with as well as the defense was playing.

Speaking of the defense- what a turn around!  They went from allowing a franchise record for 4th quarter points allowed, to shutting down the last two teams in the second half.  Whether it was the game sealing sack of David Garrard, or taking down Maurice Jones-Drew down in the backfield when the Jags were starting to sniff success, this defense came up big.  Of special note was the play of Vontae Davis.  For a while it looked like Sean Smith was going to be the better pick, but Davis has really been battle hardened after Will Allen went down.  He blanketed break out receiver Mike Sims-Walker all day, and he had absolutely no impact on the game.  He also made several big plays in the run game to help severely limit MJD.  Meanwhile, Sean Smith (& Gibril Wilson, of course) gave up the only big play of the day on a 60+ yard toss to Torry Holt- but otherwise played pretty well.   The real standout though, was Randy Starks- simply put, if he doesn’t make the Pro Bowl this year, then the Pro Bowl has no meaning.  He is blowing up running plays and smashing QBs on what seems like every play.  Of course, helping him out has been a massively (no pun intended) Paul Soliai.  The 360 lbs Samoan NT is becoming a better anchor every game, and is displaying surprising sideline to sideline agility.

The offense did have its moments.  Chad Henne set a single game record with 17 completions in a row, and was generally efficient- besides his untimely pick.  Ricky also ran pretty well- he just had some bad butterfingers he’ll need to clean up before next week.

Hopefully, the defense can keep playing this well next week - and the offense can snap back into its normal, non fumbling mode.  I’ll go into a more detailed look at the Titans game later this week, but the Dolphins are playing meaningful football in December for the second year in a row - when was the last time you could say that?