Yes he did.
I would love for our head coach to run this team the way Sparano runs his.
Coach Parcells may have "run down" the team, but he has the Dolphins clicking on all cylinders.
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Miami Dolphins coach Tony Sparano stays vocal even in good times
Tony Sparano is following the lead of some great NFL coaches who were most critical of their teams when they were winning.
BY DAVID J. NEAL
dneal@MiamiHerald.com
It's one of the paradoxes of coaching, especially in professional sports: often, sideline and bench jockeys need to go to the whip more when their teams are winning than when they're losing.
The Dolphins have had ''Victory Mondays'' the past two weeks, off days that, combined with their usual Tuesday off, mean they don't have to be back in the Dolphins facility until Wednesday's practice. That's about the only rest they can expect this week from a coaching staff that remembers its first two-game winning streak this season resulted in a week of good feeling and losses to Houston and Baltimore.
And there's the same good feeling around the Dolphins now that they're back to .500 at 4-4 and have home games against 2-6 Seattle, 2-6 Oakland and New England minus Tom Brady. Much as players say they don't pay attention to the media and fan noise, it's too incessant not to read or hear in the tone of interaction with reporters and fans.
This is what worries coaches.
''I want to see absolute attention to detail and focus right now,'' Dolphins coach Tony Sparano said. 'We've been down this road before. We've won two games and we kind of drank the Kool-Aid a little bit and then we lost two of them. Now we've won a couple, so we can't do that. We can't worry about everybody telling us `what a good job you did' right now. We need to keep our head down and really keep swinging.''
Fans, especially those who love to live vicariously through emotional coaches verbally eviscerating athletes, might be surprised how many Hall of Fame coaches were bigger yellers in the good times than in the bad.
'DON'T LET UP'
Vince Lombardi, who valued exhaustive preparation over great motivation, would drop the volume a notch in favor of more teaching during the rare Green Bay rough streak. So did John Madden when he coached Oakland in its glory days, back before he became a broadcaster and a video game title.
''As a coach, when your team starts a streak going, you don't let up,'' Madden wrote in One Knee Equals Two Feet. 'Instead, you've got to be tough. You've got to be just the opposite of the way the players are. When your team wins two or three in a row, the players' friends tell them how great they are. But that's when you've got to pound that work ethic into them. If they win the next game, they'll accept it again the following week. But even before you see them trying to slide, that's when you've got to whap them back into line.''
Conversely, Madden said, ``When we were on a losing streak, I'd try to be gentle with my players. Well, not exactly gentle but I'd try not to get upset, not to get angry. When you're angry, you say things you don't mean. And when your team is losing, angry words hurt and form scars.''
Of course, Madden's Raiders didn't lose very often and expected to be in the Super Bowl every year -- they won one Super Bowl and reached the AFL/AFC title game six other times in Madden's 10 seasons. There were no one-win seasons or six-season playoff droughts that allowed two-game win streaks to create a glorious feeling among friends and fans.
Still, the Dolphins' brass has denied throughout 2008 that this season would be just about regaining respectability.
IN THE MIX
''Every team goes into a new season thinking, obviously, the best,'' Sparano said. ``We went into the season feeling like we had just as good of a chance to put ourselves in the mix as anyone else did. I don't know right now whether or not that's where we are, but I know is that today we wake up and we're one of 15 teams right now that have four or five wins in this league. We just kind of threw ourselves into the middle of something here, and all we've done right now is create an opportunity to have a real big game at home this week.''
