Reading the New Defense: Miami Dolphins

Photo: USA Today Sports

Footballguy Sigmund Bloom often opines that there is no longer an information advantage in fantasy football. Increased media coverage of the NFL scouting combine, breaking news on social media, and advanced analytics are all equalizers in fantasy football.

Coverage of skill-position players is a daily exercise. NFL defenses, however, do not enjoy the same limelight.

Offense is to the big city what defense is to the small town. News of defenders travels more slowly and is less sensationalized. Complex data for analysis are harder to come by. IDP fantasy gamers find themselves unaware of important changes to player values hiding in plain sight.

Fantasy gamers drafted perennial DB1 Jordan Poyer with confidence last summer, only to be disappointed. He played deep too often to compile tackles. A year ago, Josey Jewell, Jordan Hicks, and Frankie Luvu were afterthoughts at best. Each finished among fantasy football's top 24 linebackers.

Clues foreshadowing these revelations exist. This series interprets changes in rosters, player contracts, personnel groupings at organized team activities (OTAs), and insights new coordinators will offer into defensive philosophy. The goal is to read a new defense and anticipate fluctuations in IDP fantasy values.

Related: See a similar look at the coaching change in Carolina >>>

Changing Schemes

Bloom also speaks of talent, situation, and opportunity as the three legs of a tripod that supports fantasy value. Defensive scheme changes can be so impactful to fantasy value that they constitute a fourth leg. Each season, roughly a quarter of the NFL's teams hire new defensive coordinators.

This article is the third in a series examining the potential effects on defenders' fantasy values imposed by new defensive schemes. The first, covering Sean Desai and the Philadelphia Eagles, noted similarities between the Eagles' 2022 defense and the defense Desai coordinated in Chicago in 2021. The piece further contemplated personnel moves and comments about them from the coaching staff and front office.

Reading the New Defense: Philadelphia Eagles addressed the change in nomenclature from “4-3” to “3-4.” Some fantasy football leagues operate on sites that rely on team depth charts for position designations. Such leagues experience drastic shifts in player values based on team nomenclature while the duties of affected players change subtly, if at all. Footballguy Gary Davenport investigates position redesignation in his piece, The Effect of True Position on IDP.

Ejiro Evero assumed control of the Broncos' defense in 2022, but upheaval on the other side of the ball led to upheaval in the coaching ranks. Evero landed on his feet in Carolina and will likely implement a scheme similar to that not only of the 2022 Broncos but also of Sean Desai, as explained in the second edition of this series.

Both Evero and Desai have served as assistants under Vic Fangio, the incoming defensive coordinator of the Miami Dolphins. This article contemplates schematic changes and personnel deployment that Fangio might install in Miami.

A comparison of Josh Boyer's Dolphins defenses in 2021 and 2022 to Vic Fangio's recent defenses in Chicago and Denver is a study in contrasts. Boyer's defense became an outlier, leading the league in coverages designed around a single-high safety (sometimes referred to as “middle-of-the-field closed” or MOFC versus “middle-of-the-field open” or MOFO). Under Boyer's direction, the 2022 Dolphins blitzed a third of the time, the third-highest rate in the league. In a Spurrier-esque failure to adjust his scheme to his personnel, Boyer continued to blitz despite losing starting slot cornerback Nik Needham early in the season to an Achilles' tendon tear and never getting back Byron Jones from a 2021 injury at all. Undrafted rookie Kader Kahou started opposite Xavien Howard and led the league in targets faced in coverage.

Vic Fangio coordinated defenses for the Texans and Panthers when they began play as NFL expansion teams. The 49ers went to Super Bowl XLVII with Fangio guiding its defense. Fangio inherited middling personnel in Chicago, propelling Mitchell Trubisky to the playoffs. Despite his dismissal from his first and only head coaching job in Denver, Fangio's reputation as a defensive mastermind has grown.

Thought this would be an interesting study into Fangio’s calls and tendencies from 2018 through 2021. Although his vanilla pre-snap presentations and his affinity for post-snap rotation remained steady, the mechanics varied more than the typical DC. Elite. Adaptable. The Sensei. pic.twitter.com/U5jc2ozNSh

— Honest NFL (@TheHonestNFL) June 10, 2023

Vic Fangio will push the range of NFL defensive tendencies with light boxes and pre-snap split-safety looks. He builds out coverages first and assigns remnant resources to defending the run. Fangio will not lead the league in MOFO coverages (with split or two high safeties), as is believed in some corners. His defense will rotate into the called coverage after the snap.

I explain the Fangio system's 1-Lurk, or 1-Rat, coverage.#ArtofX x #NFL pic.twitter.com/JtcLfQRztt

— Cody Alexander (@The_Coach_A) March 27, 2023

Fangio's extensive track record also shows that he will tailor his play calling to his personnel. He will play a healthy, albeit not necessarily league-leading, number of snaps in man coverage with Xavien Howard, Jalen Ramsey, and second-round pick Cam Smith at cornerback and emerging free safety Jevon Holland deep. He'll blitz because he can in front of this secondary, not because he must. Jaelan Phillips and Bradley Chubb will win with help from simulated pressure.

Unfortunately for fantasy gamers, the hype surrounding Vic Fangio's real-world defense doesn't translate to exciting defensive stat sheets. The interchangeable pieces of Fangio's vanilla pre-snap looks limit disparities in player production relative to each other. The two primary defensive tackles will demonstrate similar tackling efficiency, as will the starting linebackers and starting safeties.

Defensive Fronts

Vic Fangio's defense is built on 3-4 architecture. Like every other practitioner of odd fronts, Fangio will deploy a four-man front for the majority of the Dolphins' snaps in 2023.

Dolphins Interior Defenders

Christian Wilkins and Zach Sieler will start at defensive end in Fangio's base personnel and will operate as the two primary interior defenders in most sub-packages. Fantasy football platforms still using conventional position designations will continue to label them ‘DE' in 2023. To the extent that true-position leagues with tackle-heavy scoring exist, Sieler has been a solid IDL2 (interior defensive line) for the past two years.

Wilkins, meanwhile, has been one of the league's most productive tacklers among all defensive linemen – 187 combined from 2021 to 2022. This volume arises from the frequent man coverage and blitzing of Josh Boyer. The defensive linemen simply can't afford to not make tackles because linebackers and safeties often have their backs turned in coverage or are getting upfield as blitzers.

Wilkins's 2023 tackle total will be a classic case of regression to the mean, wherein the mean is the rate of tackles per snap of NFL interior defenders. No lineman under Fangio's direction has ever collected more than 68 tackles, and that happened in 2005 for a terrible Texans team. Fangio's most prolific tackling Broncos lineman was Shelby Harris, with 49. Pro Bowler Akiem Hicks managed 55 for the 2018 Bears under Fangio.