Face it, Miami: Your professional football team sucks. Try and try as we might, there is no amount of cheering, participation, ticket purchasing, blogging, or calling into local sports talk radio that will change that fact.
It's something we've been trying to get used to for years, as we watched our suckiness evolve from merely not winning championships to becoming one of the league's consistently lackluster teams. Apparently, this is the penalty for being the only team in NFL history that has ever had a perfect season.
To honor the crap on the field, including yesterday's last-minute loss to the Panthers, here are ten reasons being a Miami Dolphins fan sucks almost as much as the team itself.
10. Even your fantasy team sucks.
Being a Dolphins fan means that not only will you be forced to watch a shitty football team all year, but you also likely drafted a Dolphins player for your fantasy team out of loyalty. Now they're underperforming week after week and costing you some serious points.
Suck as a team, suck as an individual. It's the Dolphins way.
9. You can remember when the Dolphins were respectable.
It's not like Don Shula was coaching the team in the 1800s or Dan Marino is an 80-year-old guy who gets wheeled out only during ring of honor inductions, making your kids ask who the old fart in the wheelchair is. The Dolphins were really, really good for a very long time. They were even the winningest franchise in NFL history until the last week of the 2009 season.
Now the Dolphins lead the NFL in crap, and the smell has been fairly unpleasant.
8. Hope.
Some call it loyalty; we call it delusion. For some reason, year after year, fans believe "this is the year," claiming the Dolphins have made some "great off-season moves." Somehow it's been impossible to learn from the brilliance of moves like AJ Feely, Carlos Dansby, Brandon Marshall, Ted Ginn Jr., losing Reggie Bush, and a plethora of rotating quarterbacks, coaches, and front-office personnel.
7. At some point in the past four seasons, you rooted for Richie Incognito.
The first sign should have been his tattoos.
No one in the Dolphins organization had the foresight to realize that the guy who was consistently voted in the top five of Sporting News' "dirtiest player in the league" poll year after year would be a problem.
Yet, as a Dolphins fan, you loved having that dirty son of a bitch on your team. Is it really so surprising that he allegedly throws around the N-word, threatens other players' family members' lives, and struts around pool halls with his shirt off? Come on -- this guy is a total d-bag, and you rooted for him. Accept it.
6. Dave Wannstedt.
Dave Wannstedt and his majestic mustache of amazingness is no longer just a person in the history of Dolphins football; he's a symbol. He embodies all the ineptitude and idiocy that is now the modus operandi of the Miami Dolphins football organization. Every bad decision, every misstep, every time the team settles for a field goal instead of going for a touchdown, all have the background tones known in a one-word whisper: Wannie.
5. Dolphins love their crazies.
Incognito isn't the only weirdo in Dolphins history. What about Ricky Williams? Or Jonathan Martin? Or Brandon Marshall, Cecil Collins, Mark Duper, David Woodley...
Every team has its problems, like how the Cincinnati Bengals had a remarkable stretch of players going to jail, or the Minnesota Vikings' propensity for sex parties. The Dolphins' problem (well, one of them) is that when a player becomes part of the team, it's a good sign he needs to have his head examined.
4. Jeff Ireland is named for a country of drunkards -- and he makes decisions like one.
The only thing that makes this bullet point better is that there's a chance that Jeff Ireland will finally be fired. The awfulness he's brought on this team, which can be best exemplified by the 2010 draft scandal where Ireland asked star wide receiver Dez Bryant if his mother was a prostitute, is worse than one of the plagues Moses brought to Egypt -- except the plagues ended in frogs and death, and Ireland brought us Daniel Thomas.
3. Our owner looks like the human Droopy.
Is this really that bad? No. But it's worth making the joke just to put their pictures side by side.
2. We haven't been to a Super Bowl since 1984 and haven't won it since 1973.
Super Bowls: Miami loves to host them but hates to play in them. It's been 40 years since our last championship. Forty years! To put it in perspective, Tony Orlando had the number one song in 1973. Alex Trebek debuted in the U.S. on the show The Wizard of Odds. Worst of all, not a single current Dolphins player was alive in 1973.
1. Our mascot is the dolphin.
In what universe will a dolphin ever strike fear into the hearts of other men? Maybe it made more sense in the 1960s, when everyone was tripping on acid and feared for their lives that actual dolphins might burst from the oceans to take over the world. But it's 2013, and we've discovered other, more horrific ocean life, such as toothpick fish and goblin sharks, rendering dolphins nothing more than the ocean's puppies. It's time for a change.
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