Dolphins in Drydock

With a pool a few feet from his bedroom, a golf course just beyond his backyard, and consecutive Super Bowl victories in his scrapbook, Miami Dolphin Coach Don Shula could hardly be blamed for romping on his laurels. Training camp does not open for 3 1/2 months; there should be little to do. Right? Wrong. Shula is in fact working ten hours or more a day searching out Dolphin weaknesses and building strengths.

Most pro football coaches go through a similar process. None is more exacting than Chief Mechanic and Perfectionist Shula, who is intent upon analyzing every piece of the smoothest-running machine in the game. "The work is tedious," he said in a recent interview with TIME Contributing Editor Philip Taubman. "But if we didn't do it, we could very well start losing games. I demand total involvement from my players, and they can expect the same from me during the season and off."

Missed Man. The first step in the Shula overhaul is "grading" films of last season's games. This is no cursory screening. Using an elaborate marking system, Shula and his six assistant coaches go over every play to grade the performance of each player. In reviewing last October's Miami-Cleveland game, for instance, Shula and his staff discovered 50 breakdowns in Dolphin defenses during the first half alone.

Each player's performance is examined minutely. The Dolphins' linebacker coach, for example, checked the effectiveness of Middle Linebacker Nick Buoniconti whenever he was on the field. If Buoniconti was out of position, a "1" for "missed man" or an "m" for "missed assignment" was recorded on a large tally sheet. A good play was noted with "2" for "got his man."

Too many bad marks can cost a player his job. "In going back over one season," recalls Shula, "we couldn't believe we'd played one guy all year when we saw how much better his replacement performed after the starter was injured. We kept asking ourselves, 'Why did we go with that guy so long?' He didn't play again."

Plays are examined just as carefully as players. By editing the films, Shula & Co. can concentrate on one problem at a time. They can review an entire season's worth of play-action passes, say, without having to watch any other action. From the resulting statistics, the staff can tell at a glance which plays are consistent ground gainers and which are unreliable. The strengths of various defensive alignments get the same meticulous study.

The collection of all this material, a dull six-week job enlivened only by the occasional breakdown of the projector or a lunchtime basketball game, is a prelude for Simla's key off-season job: rewriting the offensive and defensive scripts. "To get the clutter out of our playbook," explains Shula, "we have to scrap plays that don't work. If we didn't do that, our quarterback might go into a huddle in a crucial situation, unknowingly pick a flawed play out of the playbook he has memorized, and we could lose." Counting variations on basic tactics, there are approximately 100 plays in the Dolphin book and each season between 5% and 10% are abandoned. In recent years the Dolphins have dropped quick screen passes and a series of counterflow running plays in which the ball carrier fakes a step in one direction and runs in the other. Two or three new plays are usually added every year, and some marginally successful tactics are revised. The Dolphins' most successful new plays in the past few years have been those in the "misdirection" series. In this gambit the ball is faked to Halfback Mercury Morris running a sweep, then handed off to Fullback Larry Csonka. He is supposed to drive up the middle through a hole theoretically created when opposing linemen chase Morris.

When the latest versions of the playbooks are ready, usually by mid-May, Shula is set for the final stage of his off-season program: planning the upcoming training camp. This, too, is revised from year to year, though it always bears the Shula stamp of relentless organization. Last year many of the days were broken down into ten-minute periods for jogging, machine work and other exercises. Many Dolphin veterans, as Shula himself admits, "bitch and moan" about the regimentation. "But they always do what we ask." Last year Shula asked for a second Super Bowl win. This year he will be requesting a third.

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