Vacchiano: Parcells a good fit for Miami

A week ago, Miami Dolphins fans got the only present they wanted this Christmas — a win to guarantee they wouldn’t become the first 0-16 team in NFL history.
 
A few days later they got something even better: Bill Parcells.
 
Landing the Tuna was the catch of a lifetime for Wayne Huizenga, the owner of the Dolphins who has been desperately trying to recapture the glory years from back when Joe Robbie owned the team. Mostly he’s failed to duplicate the success of the Don Shula-Dan Marino era.
 
It all bottomed out this year with a 1-14 (so far) team.
 
That’s what led him to Parcells, the future Hall of Fame coach who seems to specialize in reclamation projects. He built the Giants into two-time Super Bowl champions in the late ‘80s and ‘90s. Then he moved onto New England, where he turned the woeful Patriots into a Super Bowl team. After that, it was onto the Jets, where he took a loser of a franchise and made it respectable.
 
His last stop was in Dallas, where he assembled the core of a Cowboys team that is currently the best in the NFC.
 
Of course, he was a coach at all those stops, which is something he insists he won’t be doing down in Miami. He’s not even going to be the general manager there, choosing the title of Executive Vice President of Football Operations instead. Parcells had control over personnel decisions in all three of his stops after he left the Giants. He was fond of saying how if he was going to cook the meal, he wanted to buy the groceries.
 
In this case he won’t even be buying the groceries. He’s basically just the one making the shopping list.
 
Still, no football decision will be made in Miami anymore without it going through Parcells first, and that can only be a good thing. He has a history of unearthing talented coaches and players. Remember, Bill Belichick was his long-time defensive coordinator, and Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo was once an undrafted free agent that Parcells took under his wing.
 
Maybe he can find similar gems and bring them to Miami, but he’s not likely to do it without cleaning house first. First-year coach Cam Cameron can’t be feeling too secure these days in his Dolphins offices. Neither can any of the players on his embarrassment of a team.
 
In fact, the Dolphins have become such a disaster that this can arguably be considered Parcells’ toughest job of all. He’s starting basically from scratch on a team mostly void of talent. He’s in a division with the New England Patriots, one of the best teams and franchises ever.
 
And, worst of all, he can’t — or won’t — hire himself to coach.
 
But somehow, some way, the Tuna will turn things around. That’s about as good a guarantee as there is in the league these days. Huizenga can rest easy knowing this time he got it right.
 
“We need to get back on that winning track again,” Huizenga said. “It’s all about winning. If you win, everything else takes care of itself. It’s win, win, win. That’s all we want to do. I’ve said that before and we didn’t do it this year. We’re going to get this thing back.
 
“And I can’t think of anyone better than Bill Parcells.”
 
You can’t really fault the owner for his past failures, either, because he really did try. He once hired Jimmy Johnson, who couldn’t recapture his Dallas magic and preferred to sit on his fishing boat anyway. He lured Nick Saban away from college, as many NFL teams wanted to do, only to see the Nicktator stab him in the back
 
This time, though, it’s all going to work. Parcells isn’t in this for the long-term, and Huizenga knows it. This is all about bringing the Dolphins back to respectability and making a quick fix. Nobody is better at either of those tasks than Parcells, who immediately will make South Florida an attractive destination for free agents.
 
It won’t be long before he’s cleaned up the mess and the Dolphins start to win.

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