Dolphins Week 7 Instant Takeaways: It Might Be That Time

Cleveland Browns safety Grant Delpit (9) sacks Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa (1) during the first half at Huntington Bank Field. | Ken Blaze-Imagn Images

Was this the game that might prompt the kind of change that Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross has been reluctant to make?

Have we reached the point where enough is enough and the Dolphins simply have to do something drastic because staying the course simply isn't working.

Things just keep getting worse for the Dolphins, and this loss against the Cleveland Browns in Week 7 now stands as the most disturbing performance of the season.

This was nothing short of embarrassing.

And there's probably not one key player who should be exempt from criticism, not even De'Von Achane, who basically was the offense again but dropped a couple of passes.

Not Tua Tagovailoa, who could have put the whole postgame comment brouhaha behind him with a strong performance but instead was ineffective, with pressure on him explaining only a fraction of the offensive issues.

This was an embarrassment from A to Z, including M for Mike McDaniel.

There have been rumblings about McDaniel's shaky job security, and this is the kind of game that gets coaches fired.

Owner Stephen Ross has been reported to want to be patient with McDaniel, but at some point, again, enough has to be enough.

Ross said in his famous/infamous statement at the end of last season that the status quo wouldn't be acceptable, but what is happening right now is far less acceptable.

The Dolphins aren't going to make the playoffs this season, and it's not a coaching change that's going to make the difference in that, but are they just supposed to run out the string to make the move that now seems inevitable after the season?

The decision to bring back McDaniel (as well as GM Chris Grier) wasn't an overly popular one among Dolphins fans and maybe we should have seen this coming in a way because the two times Ross has made an in-season coaching change, it came after he expressed his support the previous year — he gave Tony Sparano a contract extension before firing him 13 games into the 2011 season, he made an announcement late in the 2014 that he was bringing back Joe Philbin only to fire him four games into the 2015 season.

CBS analyst Adam Archuleta summed things up pretty well midway through the fourth quarter when he said, "This is a bad look for the Miami Dolphins."

That might have been an understatement.

TUA AND THE PUNCHLESS OFFENSE

-- Not that it would have made a difference in the outcome, but why were the Dolphins so conservative and casual on offense around the middle of the third quarter. What we saw were a bunch of running plays and zero sense of urgency at a time when they were trailing by 18 points. Even early in the fourth quarter, the Dolphins ran on first and second down before Tua's second interception set up the score that made it 31-6.

-- It was a second consecutive three-interception day for Tua Tagovailoa, and this one was much rougher than the game against the Chargers. Yes, the Dolphins continue to operate without Tyreek Hill and also lost Darren Waller in the first half with a pec injury, but that's life in the NFL. And this game did nothing to dispell the notion — or something I've said for a long time — that Tagovailoa is a great distributor who will put up good numbers if things around him are good or ideal but also needs more help than the top-tier quarterbacks around the league.

-- De'Von Achane continues to produce big plays and big numbers for the Dolphins, but it's now two years in a row he's been the focal point of the offense and that hasn't gotten the team very far. Something else that's troublesome is Achane's nasty habit of dropping passes at the line of scrimmage. And that's not counting the short pass at the start of the second half that went off his hands and resulted in a pick-six because that was more bad thrown than clear drop.

-- The run defense was clearly better in this game in holding Quinshon Judkins to a 3.4-yard average, this despite a 46-yard touchdown. This was a game where we saw a handful of tackles for loss, something that was a long time coming.

-- The Dolphins caught some tough breaks on a couple of penalties that could have gone either way, but those usually were followed by breakdowns, a sign of a bad team. And that's what the Dolphins are right now.

-- The Dolphins are a bad team, and that's too polite a term for what we saw Sunday. I mean, a delay of game penalty in the final minute down 31-6? That's just not serious.

-- And, fittingly, Quinn Ewers was sacked on the Dolphins' final play of the game.

-- Yep, embarrassing this 31-6 loss against a Cleveland team that hadn't scored more than 17 points all season.

-- The only question after the game was whether that was the final straw for Stephen Ross.