The Dolphins' Offensive Line Problem Showed Up in Week One, Right on Schedule

Malik Willis was sacked five times. De’Von Achane, coming off a Pro Bowl season, managed 36 yards on 11 carries. Miami finished with 259 total yards, well below what the offense averaged a year ago. Those three numbers explain the 27-13 loss to the Las Vegas Raiders on Sunday better than any single play did.

This was Jeff Hafley’s first regular-season game as an NFL head coach, and it went the way most people who watched training camp expected: competitive for stretches, undone by the same problems that were supposed to be the offseason’s whole point of emphasis. The Raiders scored on a 16-play, 93-yard opening drive that Kirk Cousins directed mostly with short, safe throws. Miami trailed the rest of the way.

The Run Game Never Showed Up

Hafley spent camp talking about building the offense around Achane, with ambitions of getting him something like 40 touches a night. Instead, the Raiders sat back, stacked the box, and made Willis try to beat them throwing the ball. Achane finished with four receptions to go with his rushing total, relegated to an afterthought for much of the game, undermining Hafley’s idea of getting him 40 touches. Counting Willis’s scrambles, Miami ran the ball 17 times for just 65 yards, a 3.8-yard average that’s not close to good enough against a defense that was one of the league’s worst against the run a year ago.

That gameplan wasn’t a secret. The Dolphins knew Las Vegas would dare Willis to throw, and the offensive line — a group Miami invested heavily in this offseason, including rookie first-round pick Kadyn Proctor at left guard — didn’t hold up well enough to make the Raiders pay for it. Willis was under pressure most of the afternoon, with Maxx Crosby leading a group that got home five times. Proctor’s NFL debut came with the kind of lesson every rookie lineman eventually learns about the speed of a real regular-season game.

Willis Gave Miami Something to Build On

The one thing that went according to plan was Willis himself. Making just the seventh start of his career, he finished 15 of 27 for 220 yards with an interception, adding a rushing touchdown on a 14-yard scramble that briefly pulled Miami within four points in the third quarter. He took mostly clean shots downfield when he got time, connecting on deep balls to rookie receivers Caleb Douglas and Chris Bell. Douglas, a third-round pick, set a franchise record for receiving yards in a debut with 94 on five catches and looked like the one player on offense the Raiders hadn’t fully scouted yet.

Miami’s defense had its own version of the good-and-bad split. Rookie safety Michael Taaffe intercepted Cousins to open the second half and set up Willis’s touchdown run, and rookie linebacker Jacob Rodriguez — who has green-dot play-calling duties as a rookie, a rarity in the league — was active all over the field. But the run defense couldn’t slow down Ashton Jeanty, and a 50-yard kickoff return immediately after Miami’s touchdown let the Raiders answer right back and take control for good.

What Comes Next

Hafley said afterward he was encouraged by the fight his team showed even in a loss, and he’s not wrong that it could have been worse. But encouragement doesn’t fix an offensive line that couldn’t run the ball against a bad Raiders front, and it doesn’t fix a secondary that gave up chunk plays to a 15th-year quarterback playing bridge duty in Las Vegas. Those are the two things that will determine whether this season is about developing rookies inside a lost year or something more.

Miami gets no rest to sort it out. The Dolphins travel to face the San Francisco 49ers next Sunday, a team that opened its season with a win and won’t offer the kind of forgiving matchup a rebuilding roster needs. If the line and the run defense look the same way they did in Las Vegas, the record will say more about this team than any training camp storyline did.