It's bad enough for Dolphins fans that the Pittsburgh Steelers just wiped the floor with Miami on Monday Night Football. With the Dolphins' season hanging by a thread in Week 15, Mike McDaniel's team fell flat. But it's even worse when a legend who's played for both franchises unleashes a brutal truth about his former team.
Joey Porter, who earned Pro Bowl honors for both the Steelers and the Dolphins in the 2000s, just said what no Dolphins wanted to hear.
Porter joined Cam Heyward's Not Just Football podcast, where he admitted that playing in Miami made him softer.
"I was softer. I had got softened by Miami," Porter told Heyward. "I did. I did. I'd wake up to seventy-five, eighty [degrees] every day no matter what.
"That can't prepare you for nineteen degrees, playing football where your helmet is as hard as a rock."
He said what many football fans have been thinking for years. Going from a tropical climate in Miami to playing games in freezing conditions has always resulted in disaster for the Dolphins. There's a reason this team has lost 12 straight games when the temperatures are under 40 degrees.
The Pittsburgh Steelers are fortunate they don't have the same problem as the Miami Dolphins
The Miami Dolphins are not incapable of having a good team or a talented roster. In 2023, we saw head coach Mike McDaniel lead his team to an 11-6 record while averaging 27.9 points per game (third in the NFL). This marked the fourth straight season with a winning record and the second straight with a playoff berth.
Unfortunately, the Dolphins shrivel in the cold.
Miami hasn't won a playoff game in 25 years. This victory came against the Indianapolis Colts in Miami, where the extreme weather temperatures were not an issue.
You can see how this would impact a team like the Dolphins. Regardless of the players on the roster, they simply aren't prepared to go from the warmth down in Miami to play in a bitter-cold game in the north. Unfortunately, there's no end to this in sight.
Unless Miami can find a way to earn a first-round bye in the future (or get lucky by playing a team like the Texans, Jaguars, or Colts in the postseason), they seem doomed to face a cold-weather game against teams like Buffalo, New England, Kansas City, or Pittsburgh.
Thankfully, the Steelers will never have this problem. Mike Tomlin's team is used to cold-weather games. Pittsburgh has plenty of other issues and reasons why they haven't had playoff success in going on nine years, but this isn't one of them.
Take it from Porter: the Dolphins make players soft... and for reasons the team can't control. It's the unfortunate reality of the situation in Miami.