DT Christian Wilkins
(You had a chance to meet Queen Latifah a few weeks ago. Tell us about that.) – “Yes, I did. That was beautiful, shoutout to my girl Queen Latifah, she was everything I thought she would be. She was awesome, she was glowing. That was awesome for me to meet her. I’ve always wanted to meet her. She is one of my favorites. That was humbling for me. It was an honor to meet the Queen, I was not worthy, but she was awesome to, so it was dope. Shout out to you, girl.”
(From the early install, what stands out to you about a Vic Fangio defense?) – “We’ve got some good stuff, we’ve got some good players on the defense. We’ve got to continue to grind every day, and learn it as fast as we can, so that way come minicamp, come training camp; we’re just flying around playing fast, not really thinking. We’re all still learning it, so there are going to be mistakes in that, but guys are working hard to get it right and playing our butts off so we love to see that.”
(I heard that it puts more pressure on the defensive linemen to disengage. Obviously no pads now, but what are those challenges like?) – “We’re built for it, we just got to put the work in.”
(You had mentioned last year getting so comfortable in the scheme to kind of cheat the scheme and be able to make plays outside of it. I’m curious now that you go back to a new system in Year 1, how do jump start that process?) – “It’s the same process. It’s going to take a little more work on my end to completely understand the confines of the defense and how things are working, what it looks like, and were I can do certain things, and where I can’t do certain things. It’s going to take a lot of work on my part and also building that rapport with new guys on the defense, different backers and everything like that. We all got to get a feel for each other.”
(Where do you stand regarding contract talks? Are you optimistic something can get done this summer?) – “I let my agent handle all of that. There is a reason he’s hired. The biggest complication with the contract is the Omar Kelly clause. I’m trying to make sure I don’t have to answer any of his questions, good to see you back. (laughter)”
(Is the gap such that you’re optimistic, I know General Manager Chris Grier had said there were conversations, the priority. Is the gap close enough that you’re optimistic a deal will be closed? I guess your agent probably gives you updates periodically.) – “Like I said, I let my agent handle all of that. He has a job to do. He’s one of the best in the business so I’m putting it in his hands, controlling what I can control. Coming out here every day and leading and playing ball.”
(If you do go into this year as a contact year, is that a motivational tool?) – “I’m always motivated and motivation comes from within, not a dollar amount, but it’s just my drive to be the best and be my best. No dollar changes that, changes my mindset. Whether something gets done or not my approach is always the same.”
(What do you think when you see some of the deals like DT Daron Payne, and DT Dexter Lawrence?) – “I was excited about (Dexter) Lawrence. That’s my fat little brother, so I was excited about him. But it’s good to see. It’s just good to see the growth of the game and clearly how much d-line play, especially interior means to teams and it’s good to see that. It’s just great to see that, it’s good for the game and it’s good for the guys that come after us. I’m a big believer in doing right by the game, doing things right and paying it forward for those guys coming after you regardless of whether it’s a dollar, whether it’s just doing things the right way, someone they can look up to. I’m just big on respecting the game. It’s cool to see.”
(What is Defensive Coordinator Vic Fangio like?) – “Vic is cool. He’s definitely more of an old-school coach. He’s like a grandfather out there, but he’s good with the players and he’s good to be around so far.”
(You’ve got like, the buddy and the grandfather. How does that work between him and Head Coach Mike McDaniel?) – “Definitely different. Each of them are different but both are obviously effective coaches and good at what they do.”
(It’s pretty cool to have a balance. You’ve got this guy who has seen everything and then you’ve got Head Coach Mike McDaniel. You can still learn a lot from a guy like that.) – “Yes, absolutely. That’s one of the things I respect most abut Vic. He’s been doing it for so long and so highly regarded and just got a lot of respect.”
(Is there a different aspect to your game whether it’s pass rush or anything else that you are looking to improve on this offseason?) – “Just everything. I’m never a finished product. I didn’t make every play I was supposed to make last year. Regardless of how productive I was, there was so much more out there for me. So whether it’s getting in shape, developing my pass rush, being strong in the run, it’s all the same process.”
(Would you at least say that last year was your best year? It seemed that way to I think most of us.) – “I guess you could say that, but it won’t be my best. That’s the goal and that’s my mindset every time I work out, every time I study film, every time I eat and do that whole process. My mindset is to always be the best.”
(What are your thoughts on the run by the Heat and the Panthers? I know you’re a Massachusetts guy.) – “Absolutely. It’s bittersweet. I’m a die-hard Boston Celtics fans so it’s hard to see what’s going on right now. I’m still going down with the ship, going down with the guys. I don’t care what no one has to say. Let’s go Celtics. (laughter) But I’ve got a lot of respect for the Heat of course. Miami is my home now and I really enjoy watching the Panthers play. They are a lot of fun to watch and I’ve enjoyed being able to go to a lot of Panthers games, but they did beat the Bruins, too. So it is what it is.”
(Do you feel like this is infectious – the way that the winning is happening down here?) – “Yeah, hopefully all the teams can continue that on and just continue to have success for the fans. The fans that just deserve a winner.”
(I saw you at the Heat game with CB Jalen Ramsey. What is it like to have so many big personalities, WR Tyreek Hill last year, LB Bradley Chubb coming over, Jalen now. So many big personalities.) – “I’m already getting tired of Jalen (Ramsey) for real. (laughter) Nah, it’s cool, it’s definitely just good. It’s just good just to have those guys who have had a lot of success in the league and kind of just talk to them. They pour into us and just guys you can look to and just talk to, who’ve had a lot of success and take things from them – the process, how they approach the game, their mindset. It’s always good.”
(Although you had the green on the shoes, you had the white hot up top or was that by accident?) – “That was kind of by accident. That’s just a Miami vibe outfit, but I had to represent and make it clear that I was rocking with my Celtics and I still am tonight. Celtics in seven. (laughter)”
(One more question about CB Jalen Ramsey. As a defensive lineman, when they go out and sign a guy like that, what goes through your mind right away?) – “Obviously that’s great for the team and just great for the guys up front, and really great for the defense. A guy who has a championship pedigree, has played a lot of ball in this league, a Pro Bowler, an All Pro. Just someone you can learn from someone you’re thinking ‘all right, he does his job at a high level; that’ll only help us up front.’”
WR Jaylen Waddle
(So how was the offseason like for you?) – “It was good. Got to spend some time with the family, so that’s always good. A lot of relaxation, recovery, long season and got back to it.”
(Year 3 for you, how do you feel about your growth from last year to this year, what are some things you’re looking on improving?) – “I feel like just knowledge. Another year under my belt. I get to see how the league works even more. I think preparation, seeing defenses and knowing what a defense is going to do, how they plan on playing us and adjusting the game. I feel like it’s a lot I can grow from in the first two seasons. Still growing, just trying to stack days together.”
(After Year 1, it seemed like you guys had so much success on the field with Head Coach Mike McDaniel’s offense and what not, but he said he came to the offseason workout program and he was like, there are some specific things that we can do to get better. What are the next steps for this group?)– “I felt like we had gotten into a groove mid-season and then fell off from it later on. So really just finding that groove again, staying consistent throughout the whole year each and every week so just getting that groove and staying consistent with it.”
(What would you say about QB Tua Tagovailoa, his offseason?) – “Tua’s been great. Y’all are going to see it and y’all keep coming out, seeing how he throws the ball and he’s being him.”
(How excited were you to get into these OTAs and camps?) – “Excited. It’s always good to play against our defense. They’re learning new stuff with (Vic) Fangio and it’s a great challenge each and every day.”
(McDaniel this morning said that he says the jump from last year this time to this year is substantial. I’m curious how you feel that’ll impact your game in the second year of the system?) – “Yeah, last year I feel like we were learning. Now we kind of know the details and what he’s looking for, what Tua’s looking for. So getting to the spots, beating man coverage, things like that. So it’s just more knowledge of the offense.”
(How different was this offseason? You said it was a long season, longer than normal. How different was it?) – “Just a lot of recovery. Went in, got to really work on my body, see how my body works, see what my body likes. So that’s what comes with 17, 18-plus games.”
(With even more speed now, what have you noticed about RB De’Von Achane, the Texas A&M running back?) – “Oh man, I’ve been knowing him since he was in high school. So I’ve known he has speed from when he was younger, so just having him on our team, it’s great. He’s showcasing his ability each every day so he’s continuing to do his thing. Texas boy. Come on, now.”
(Is it just us or he seemed to have the ball in his hands a lot this practice?) – “Stay tuned, man. He’s going to one to watch. I’m definitely excited to watch him this next level.”
(You put on a couple pounds, a little more weight? Looking a little swole.) – “You see that? You see that. You see that. (laughter)”
(How much have you put on?) – “I can’t tell you that. You see me run somebody over, then you’ll know. (laughter)”
(How much stronger do you feel now?) – “You trying to arm wrestle? (laughter) I feel bigger, stronger, faster. So it’s good right now.”
(Is that part of the process though?) – “Definitely. I think each year you plan on getting better, bigger, faster, stronger, more knowledge and you’ll continue to – if you want success in this league – that’s how you’re going to continue to get it.”
(Was WR Tyreek Hill’s season about what you thought it would be or was it more?) – “Man, Tyreek is everything plus more. He’s pretty much him.”
(We’ve heard a little bit about QB Tua Tagovailoa’s jiujitsu. What do you know about his training and the way he’s working?) – “Yeah, we were working out this summer. He was like, ‘bro, I’ve got to go to jiujitsu.’ I was like, ‘hey bro, go and rock out, you got it.’ (laughter) He’s got some moves. I told him to teach me a little something-something. He’s been working on his craft, but that just shows how much he’s bought in.”
(Do you have any goals or aspirations this year? Personal accolades you want to achieve?) – “I think just staying consistent throughout the year. I feel like I was up and down last year, so just staying consistent each and every week.”
(What is WR Braxton Berrios going to give your offense?) – “Just another explosive player added to what we already have – him, (Robbie) Chosen, ‘Ced’ (Cedrick Wilson Jr.) – just adding on to make people game plan a lot harder.”
(What’s the story behind the penguin earring right there?) – “Oh yeah, I’ve had this. Y’all are late to the party. (laughter) I’ve been having this for like, two years.”
(You wore it out here a few times?) – “Yeah, yeah. Facts. I wear it in games and all.”
(I know you’re a Houston guy, but are you rooting for any of the local teams down here…?) – “Yeah, man, my Lakers are out. King James is out, so I mess with the Heat.”
Head Coach Mike McDaniel
(On the Panthers and Heat) – “How cool is that for South Florida sports just in general, just riding the 2023 but specifically the Heat and the Panthers doing a lot of things that people said they couldn’t do, which I very much appreciate and we are definitely taking note.”
(I wanted to ask you kind of a three-for-oner. So S Brandon Jones and CB Nik Needham – any sense yet if they’ll be ready for training camp with those two and then the third, young DB Trill Williams – there was some Tweet form a family member suggesting he had moved to safety. Has he moved from cornerback to safety?) – “Wow, dude, inside family lines for reporting scoops? All right. (laughter)”
(That’s why I come to you.) – “I see Brandon and Nik every day. When I say diligent, that’s what their days are. I feel good about where they’re at right now. What does that mean? Down the road I try not to get consumed with like, ‘Alright, you’re going to be ready now.’ So that you’re wearing that anxiety – we just want to stay on schedule and or ahead and all reports have been just that because of the way that our medical staff goes about their business and the way they attack their whole rehab. So excited about them. And this is the offseason. There’s a lot of power for players, specifically when you’re learning a new system, like our defense is currently learning. To be able to have versatility is always powerful when you’re talking about being an NFL player and there’s no better way to understand your responsibility within that set structure of a defense than understand what other contributors and how their issues apply to your issues, and that cross-training stuff will always be a part and it’s certainly for a couple individuals on our defense something that we’re trying to attack with that versatility. So move – if you’re reporting it to our opponents, you can say we’re moving guys left and right. But for you know, in house, a safe place for you guys, that’s just versatility is a good thing.”
(What is the addition of T Isaiah Wynn mean to the right tackle situation and OL Austin Jackson? Is that an open competition?) – “Any time that you can add Wynns to a roster, right? See what I did there? (laughter) Yeah, still got it. I’ve been training all offseason. It’s like everything else. We’re a product of our environment and when guys are going about things the right way and have experienced playing at a high level in the NFL, that raises the urgency, raises the competitiveness, and overall, helps every player involved as long as people are working together, which all of our Georgia Bulldogs are good teammates. So he’s been awesome. He’s getting work at several spots and has the opportunity to win some playing time at several spots, but it’s also, there’s only five players that play each down and overall, I know the collection of the offensive line is best served in this current environment. Who those people are; I don’t do the magnet slotting. I let people in situations whether they’re performing their lifelong dream of a job, decide their own fate. So just throw a bunch of guys in that fit the bill and I think the Dolphins are best served waiting to see who tells us who’s going to be a starter or backup or whatever.”
(As it relates to building off the successes of Year 1 with the offense, I was curious what the offseason was like for you in terms of self-scouting and what you kind of carry away with saying, “All right in Year 2, I want to improve in this area of the offense?”) – “It was kind of a critical offseason for me. I didn’t look at our offense, and say, ‘Wow, we did all this stuff good.’ I saw all the stuff that we could improve upon. Now, the stuff that the players and coaches did last year, you shouldn’t minimize that because there was substantial growth, to the tune of improving – quick math – 25 spots. And in your league-wide ranking, that should never be minimized. But that’s not where we’re trying to go. So the coaching staff was ready for the players to get back and realistically, players love direction. They love – ‘we need to be better’ only goes so far. So, identifying critical things in our game. An easy one was pre-snap penalties. We were the worst at that. So got a lot of ways to improve there. I think it’s important in the offseason that you give the season – there’s a lot of things that go into it. There’s a lot of pressures and you’re just trying to win the next game. Taking a step back, I think affords people a little more open mindedness. And all I’ve seen is an offense, I’ve seen a team that isn’t satisfied with where they’re at. They see 2023 is an opportunity to really move past where we were last year. And that’s the way they’ve approached it. From route running to how we block people, to everything in between; the consistency of our fundamentals and detail has been huge and we’ve had as a result, I mean, the growth that we made in Phase 1 and Phase 2, relative to last year, is astronomical. Guys really had a comfort level of what – here with the Miami Dolphins, we come to work to get better. And we don’t spend any time or any focus on anything but that and we know that this game has a place for a lot of us individually, as long as we continue to get better. It’s pretty cut and dry and it should be that way. You know, the coaches, players, we all have jobs that are hard to get and you shouldn’t – the second that you’re not trying to get better, there’s an entitlement there that I don’t really think helps one succeed. So it’s been a lot of what we can get better at. If you guys are feeling up for it, maybe throw me a pat on the back, because I haven’t given myself many this year.”
(I believe this is the first time QB Tua Tagovailoa has been back on the field for team drills since that concussion. What have you seen from him this offseason as he starts to get back to football?) – “I’ve seen a guy that’s followed through with his words as well as any young man that I’ve come across in my career. Controlling the controllable is something that I would epitomize his offseason with. You want to talk about going above and beyond – training, martial arts. So much so that he knew the training before he knew what it was called. I think he was calling it judo. Jiujitsu is what he was doing, but that in terms of helping him progress in his career has been phenomenal. The work that he’s done this offseason, it was so obviously beneficial that we’ve incorporated it into some of our drill work that we’ll do with the quarterbacks to – I think it was Teddy Bridgewater made this point to me last year. As a quarterback you go, September starts, and then you get tackled. And then you get tackled for six months and then you don’t again until September. So how can we help train quarterbacks to stay healthy because it wasn’t just too early. How do you stay healthy in this game and stay available? And that’s something that that whole offseason training has really helped us try to take a good step in the right direction for how to best prepare players for an NFL season.”
(On that jiu-jitsu, obviously we’ve heard but we haven’t seen it. Have you seen any of it and if at all, what does that look like as far as his training and how it translates?) – “It kind of looks like bullying. Like it’s just a guy being attacked and going to the ground. And then how to transfer energy to disperse it and not have a central impact focus. It’s something that, it makes you think, hey, why haven’t we detailed this before? Because when you think about it, you have so much coaching that goes into where you stand in the huddle, how you deliver the play call, your pre-snap process and how you diagnose things into the play. You’re coaching all this stuff, and then you have a throw and an impending hit and then we just stop talking. That’s where my training was as a coach up until this point. So training, follow through and how to protect yourself while getting hit so that you can continue to play is something that’s applicable for everyone. They haven’t trained me how to do the tutorial. I think that’s when it will really start to take shape because I’ll just be knocking individuals over that are much bigger than me. But season one, let’s leave it to the experts and let somebody else beat him up a little bit, but it’s been very positive in terms of controlling what we can control and how to go along the process of injury prevention as best we can.”
(Whose idea was it for QB Tua Tagovailoa to enter into that training? Was it something you guys jointly came up with?) – “It’s really hard sometimes for me to even to remember the etymology for things like that. I know Coach (Darrell) Bevell was spit-balling some problem-solving things that we could do because he hadn’t been along this territory as well. Dave Puloka and Kyle Johnston were very involved in all this stuff. But really, it’s amazing what can happen when you’re not focused on who gets the credit. I think everyone, and because of that, no one. Does that make sense? It’s everyone’s idea so it’s no one’s idea. That’s deep, right, hashtag deep.”
(Can you be more specific and sort of paint me a picture of what this training looks like?) –“I mean, come up here. (laughter) Just picture this. It’s a lot of strategic falling that is patterned after things that happened to our quarterbacks during the season. So kind of recreating those things because the master of jujitsu had to study some game tape to understand how he was falling, where the impact points were and what we could do to help correct it. By and large, you find out that core strength is very much important when you’re talking about the transfer of energy of the human body going to the ground and different things that you can do to minimize that are strategic, but then strengthening of the core so that when you’re going to the ground, the top of your torso isn’t just a leverage whipping device. I think there’s a bunch of different movements. I’m sure they have names. I couldn’t describe them adequately. The best thing I have is, yeah, they’re getting taken to the ground in the fashion they got taken to the ground in as best replicated in the course of their playing experience.”
(Are you going to hand out white belts to everybody?) – “No, black belts. I mean, we’re not dabbling in this to be novices. You know, we’re trying to own it.”
(Speaking of that versatility defensively that you were talking about, is LB Andrew Van Ginkel at inside linebacker which was reported by the league-owned network?) – “Report away. I know from an offensive standpoint, when you have an edge player that will in packages or maybe a game or maybe no games have the ability to play off-the-ball backer; that in terms of identification for how you pick up protections and those things are very important. Not to mention the fact that you can – position flexibility allows you to have an extra human being at each position on game day. A little two-for-oner. So I think on top of just understanding all of the defense, it’s instrumental because every piece of the puzzle has to cover at some point and then understanding rush patterns and all those things; it’s beneficial to a guy that we thought – that led by Vic (Fangio) and really just our entire defense staff – thought that he was at the point of his career where he could handle and it’s advantageous for us, tough for the opponent. So sounds like a win. Full circle.”
(The NFL is going to allow a third quarterback now in emergency situations. What are your thoughts on that rule change?) – “I think there’s a shared sentiment among fans, coaches, players. When we watch a football game, we’d prefer to see a quarterback playing the position of quarterback. I think that rule lends that to be a capability of teams so makes sense to me and I’m all for it. I fit in that pool with everyone else.”
