Dave Hyde: Time for Boss Ross to shake things up after Dolphins go kaput in Houston

Do it, Steve Ross.

Shake up this mediocre Miami Dolphins organization.

Make the necessary moves starting with replacing general manager Chris Grier after another disappointing game basically ending another troubling season came down to the Dolphins’ best players not being good enough Sunday.

Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa twice came to the line in the final few minutes to spot receiver Tyreek Hill in a one-on-one matchup against Houston cornerback Derek Stingley Jr.

Twice, Stingley came out with an interception.

“It was just not a good ball,” Tagovailoa said of the second interception, the one that effectively ended the Dolphins’ 20-12 loss with less than two minutes remaining. “You’ve got to throw it further down (the field) for Tyreek.”

So, do it, Boss Ross.

Find someone better than Grier to improve the drafts, build a better team and, most of all, dictate a winning style of football for this franchise to stand for. This season, whose hopes flickered from the opening kickoff, finally flickered out in Houston.

Sunday was another troubling statement of everything that goes wrong against good teams. That’s beyond those two Tua interceptions. Go down the list. Four turnovers. No running game again. Special teams changing another day the wrong way as the Texans’ reverse on a fake punt set up a vital touchdown.

The Dolphins defense did its job Sunday — give it full credit — but the offense again didn’t show up for another big game on the road. How many times has this happened over the past few years?

“It was a game we thought we were ready to go win and we weren’t,” Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel said.

Who’s accountable for this? Because Ross can’t go through another offseason pretending these problems will just go away like the winter wind when that was the idea he took last season. Can he?

It’s fine and dandy for the Dolphins to talk of where they would be if Tua didn’t miss four games this season, or how strapped they were in Sunday’s big game down their top three tackles injured. There’s an excuse for you every day and every season if you want to take it, as Bill Parcells used to say.

Someone was responsible for not having a NFL-quality backup quarterback on the roster. And the three missing tackles, while troublesome, didn’t cost the Dolphins the game on Sunday.

This larger team architecture cost this team again and again. Personnel. Drafts. How to spend money. What kind of team to build. That’s the center of the Dolphins problems, year after year.

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It will cost them more coming up, too, if someone doesn’t start looking out for the organization in a manner no one did last offseason by rewarding players who haven’t won anything with extended contracts and unnecessary riches.

The slope gets more slippery as the oldest roster in the league gets older without winning anything. This franchise could be headed for the Dark Ages again if better decisions aren’t made coming up.

Ross talked in the preseason to the Dolphins broadcasters about how this was a potential Super Bowl team. Maybe it was just the stuff owners say in preseason. But no one’s talking such nonsense now.

This is a 6-8 team. Even with Tua starting, it’s 5-5. That’s not going to get you anywhere but on the sofa in another January. This is a soft team in a hard game, a team that can’t win the tough game when the season depends on it.

Why? Well, some of that’s coaching players to be too comfortable. Much of it’s the larger organization as reflected last summer when Grier and Tua chuckled about questions over the interior line play. They didn’t need good, physical middle of the line, the idea was, because the ball would be thrown too quickly.

Tagovailoa was sacked four times and had four turnovers Sunday. He was sacked five times and his offense had three points at halftime in Green Bay. That’s not just because their guards aren’t good. But what this franchise hasn’t figured out is you can’t have glaring problems anywhere and win big, and they have glaring problems all over the roster.

Here’s an organizational problem: This team over-relies on a good quarterback who as Sunday showed again is a few daddy-long-legs steps from great. Do they mistakenly over-value him? Do they do so because he’s their best bet when the running game has 50, 39 and 44 yards the past three games?

Did we have this same conversation last season?

This makes 24 consecutive years this franchise hasn’t won a playoff game — the past 16 with Ross as owner. Six seasons ago, he decided to trade good players, tank a season or two and keep Grier around to oversee this massive rebuild.

“Basically, the decision was made as I looked at it and saw that, today, we’re no further along than when I bought the team,” Ross said after the 2018 season. “We’ve been operating under a philosophy that we had a good young roster and it needed maybe free agents and draft choices and we’d be very competitive.”

Does that apply today?

“To keep operating under that philosophy would be like the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result,” Ross said then. “So, I thought it was time for the organization to take a different approach.”

It’s time for another different approach. Do what’s necessary, Boss Ross. The starting point is to replace Grier with someone capable of making the hard decisions looming over another troubling season.