Miami Dolphins

The Miami Dolphins joined the American Football League as an expansion franchise in 1966, the brainchild of attorney Joe Robbie and entertainer Danny Thomas. Miami was an unlikely football city — a sun-drenched resort town with no tradition in the sport — but Robbie believed the rapidly growing South Florida market was ripe for professional football.

The early years were predictably difficult. Under head coach George Wilson, the Dolphins posted losing records in each of their first four seasons. But the franchise was quietly building a foundation, drafting players like Bob Griese and Larry Csonka who would soon become central figures in one of the greatest dynasties in NFL history.

The merger of the AFL and NFL in 1970 placed the Dolphins in the AFC East, and the franchise's trajectory was about to change dramatically. In February 1970, Miami hired a coach who would transform not just the team, but the entire city's relationship with professional football.

Don Shula arrived in Miami in 1970, and within two years he had built the most dominant team in professional football history. The 1972 Miami Dolphins went 17-0 — 14 regular season wins, two playoff victories, and a Super Bowl championship — the only team in NFL history to complete a perfect season. The formula was deceptively simple: a suffocating defense nicknamed the "No-Name Defense," a punishing ground game led by Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, and Mercury Morris, and the steady, efficient quarterbacking of Bob Griese and Earl Morrall.

The Dolphins repeated as Super Bowl champions in 1973, cementing their status as a dynasty. Csonka's bruising 145-yard performance in Super Bowl VIII against the Vikings was the exclamation point on an era of sustained excellence that saw Miami reach three consecutive Super Bowls (1971-1973).

The rest of the decade saw the Dolphins remain consistently competitive — they made the playoffs six times in the 1970s — but they never returned to the Super Bowl under the Griese-Csonka core. The WFL briefly lured Csonka, Kiick, and Paul Warfield away after the 1974 season, fracturing the roster that had achieved perfection. Still, the 1970s Dolphins established a standard of excellence that the franchise has been chasing ever since.

In the 1983 NFL Draft, five quarterbacks were selected before Miami's pick at number 27. The Dolphins got Dan Marino, and the rest of the league spent the next seventeen years regretting it. Marino was the most prolific passer the game had ever seen — a quick-release artist with an arm that could thread a football through a closing window from fifty yards. In 1984, his second season, Marino threw for 5,084 yards and 48 touchdowns, records that would stand for two decades.

That 1984 season carried the Dolphins to Super Bowl XIX, where they faced Joe Montana's 49ers. It was supposed to be the coronation of a new dynasty. Instead, San Francisco dominated 38-16, and Marino never returned to the Super Bowl. It remains one of the great tragedies in NFL history — the most talented passer of his generation, playing for a Hall of Fame coach, in a major market, and he never won the championship.

Shula coached through the 1995 season, finishing with an NFL-record 347 career victories before retiring. Jimmy Johnson replaced him and brought a brief resurgence, but the Dolphins of the late 1990s were a playoff team without championship-level talent. Marino retired after the 1999 season holding virtually every major passing record, beloved in Miami but forever defined by what eluded him.

The post-Marino era has been defined by one overarching question: who will be the next franchise quarterback? The answer, for nearly two decades, was nobody. Jay Fiedler, A.J. Feeley, Gus Frerotte, Joey Harrington, Chad Pennington, Chad Henne, Matt Moore, Ryan Tannehill — the list of quarterbacks who started for the Dolphins after Marino reads like a catalog of competent-but-not-great signal-callers.

The coaching carousel spun with similar frequency. Dave Wannstedt had moderate success, winning the AFC East in 2000, but the franchise's trajectory was downward. Nick Saban's two-year stint (2005-2006) is best remembered for his famous "I'm not going to be the Alabama coach" denial before promptly becoming the Alabama coach. Cam Cameron's single disastrous season in 2007 produced a 1-15 record, the worst in franchise history.

Tony Sparano's wildcat offense provided a brief jolt of excitement in 2008, and Joe Philbin and Adam Gase each had their moments, but the Dolphins never sustained success. The franchise changed ownership when Stephen Ross purchased the team in 2009, and while Ross invested heavily in both the roster and Hard Rock Stadium's renovation, on-field results remained maddeningly inconsistent.