Dolphins in Rare Role as Heavy Favorites
The Miami Dolphins have come a long way since the start of the 2019 season, and one clear sign is their status as heavy favorites for their game against the New York Jets on Sunday.
This will mark the first time since Week 16 of the 2018 season that the Dolphins have been the betting favorites. They were 3-point favorites against the Jacksonville Jaguars at home and dropped a 17-7 decision in what became the next-to-last game of Adam Gase's tenure as Dolphins head coach.
And the Dolphins aren't just favorites against the Jets, they're heavy favorites.
The betting line opened with the Dolphins favored by eight points and the line moved to 9.5 by Wednesday afternoon.
To find out the last time the Dolphins were favored by that much, you have to go back to Week 3 of the 2016 season. The Dolphins were 0-2 heading into a home game against a Cleveland Browns team on its way to a 1-15 season and were favored by 10 points.
The Dolphins ended up winning 30-24 in overtime on a touchdown run by Jay Ajayi.
Overall, the Dolphins have been favored only 11 times in 69 games since the start of that 2016 season — five times in 2016, twice in 2017 and four times in 2018.
Not surprisingly, they weren't favorites once in 2019 as they were undertaking their massive rebuilding project. The closest they came was in Week 16 when they were 1.5-point underdogs against the Cincinnati Bengals and went on to win 38-35 in overtime.
To illustrate just how rare it is for the Dolphins to be heavy favorites, this week marks only the eighth time since 2010 they've been favored by at least seven points. They won five of the seven previous such games, though they covered the spread only twice.
The last time the Dolphins were favored by seven or more points was later in that 2016 when they were 7.5-point favorites against the San Francisco 49ers and pulled out a 31-24 victory when Kiko Alonso and Ndamukong Suh combined to stop Colin Kaepernick short of the goal line on the final play of the game.
Here's the complete list:
2012 - vs. Tennessee, 7-point favorites, lost 37-3
2012 - vs. Jacksonville, 7.5-point favorites, won 24-3
2013 - vs. N.Y. Jets, 7-point favorites, lost 20-7
2014 - at Jacksonville, 7-point favorites, won 27-13
2014 - at N.Y. Jets, 7-point favorites, won 16-13
2016 - vs. Cleveland, 10-point favorites, won 30-24 in overtime
2016 - vs. San Francisco, 7-point favorites, won 31-24
Ironically, the Dolphins will be facing a team coming in with an 0-5 record for the second consecutive year, though the Dolphins were 0-4 when they faced Washington in Week 6 last season and lost 17-16.
No matter how bad things look for the Jets right now, head coach Brian Flores isn't about to take them lightly.
“This is the National Football League," he said. "Every team has good players. On any given Sunday, any team can beat any other team. That’s my approach every week, whether the team’s undefeated, has won four out of five or hasn’t won any games. There is a competitive nature to these games that when you’re on the field and you see these guys compete, you understand what that is.
"I’m not taking anyone lightly. That’s going to be my message to the team. That’s how we should approach every game. That’s how every NFL team and player should approach every game. It’s the best of the best. Every team has good players. If you walk into a game thinking that somebody is going to lay down, you’re probably going to get the opposite, in my experience, in my time in this league.”
