The Dolphins have lost every postseason game they have played since that one Colts overtime victory in 2000. Now on their 12th head coach, they may finally be looking for something to break the curse. But guess who the newest head coach turned to for a lesson in coaching, or better yet, what it takes to survive in Miami?

Hafley didn’t have to look far. Miami’s coaching ghosts are back in the building. Dave Wannstedt was around Dolphins camp in June, watching Hafley settle into a job he once held himself. The two have remained close, and that connection eventually put Wannstedt, Hafley and Jimmy Johnson at the same table in Key Largo. It was there that Johnson found himself defending one of them.

“Dave was the last coach to win a playoff game with the Dolphins and had a winning record with the Dolphins…what have all the coaches done in the last 25 years?” Johnson posted on X.

The jab came from Fox News’ Armando Salguero, who mocked Wannstedt after a video of him at Dolphins camp resurfaced, joking that “2004 still hasn’t forgotten the nightmare.” When fans pushed back, Salguero doubled down, arguing that Wannstedt wasn’t even Miami’s best coach since Don Shula. Johnson saw it differently. His defense wasn’t exactly a claim that Wannstedt had been great, but rather what happened after him.

Wannstedt’s Miami tenure was far more complicated than either side of that argument suggests. He inherited a team that had just been blown out 62-7 by Jacksonville in the playoffs, then went 11-5 in his first season and won the AFC East. More importantly, that 2000 season began without Dan Marino, who had retired before the opener, leaving Wannstedt to oversee Miami’s first season without its longtime quarterback. And the playoff win Johnson is talking about was hardly a routine one.

 Miami fell behind Peyton Manning’s Colts 14-0, then rallied to tie the game with 34 seconds left. Lamar Smith carried 40 times for 209 yards, still a Dolphins playoff record, and finished the comeback with a 17-yard touchdown in overtime. Wannstedt even ended up riding on Smith’s back as the two headed toward the locker room. 

That was the first of two straight 11-5 seasons under Wannstedt. He finished his Miami tenure 42-31, the second-most wins by a coach in franchise history behind Don Shula, and took the Dolphins to the playoffs twice. But the regular-season consistency never became sustained postseason success: Miami lost its 2001 Wild Card game to Baltimore, then missed the playoffs despite going 9-7 in 2002 and 10-6 in 2003. Then came 2004, when the bottom fell out. 

Miami opened 1-8, and Wannstedt resigned in November. Jim Bates took over as interim coach. Players still defended Wannstedt even as the season collapsed; cornerback Patrick Surtain called him “a first-class guy” and pointed to the team’s own mistakes, including penalties, as evidence that not everything could be pinned on the coach.

That disastrous ending is a big reason Wannstedt’s reputation is so complicated. But it also makes Johnson’s question harder to dismiss. After Wannstedt left, Miami cycled through Nick Saban, Cam Cameron, Tony Sparano, Joe Philbin, Adam Gase, Brian Flores and Mike McDaniel before Hafley became the eighth coach after him. None won a playoff game.

The Dolphins did make the postseason four times after Wannstedt, with Sparano, Gase and McDaniel accounting for those appearances. McDaniel was the only one to get there twice, taking Miami to the playoffs in both 2022 and 2023. But those teams lost their Wild Card games to Buffalo and Kansas City, respectively. In total, Miami has made six playoff appearances since 2000 and gone 1-6, with that lone win still belonging to Wannstedt. That distinction matters because Miami’s problem hasn’t simply been getting to January. 

Hafley, meanwhile, is trying to change more than the result. His arrival came with a new general manager in Jon-Eric Sullivan, a former Packers colleague with whom he already shares a football philosophy. Miami hired Hafley in part because of what he did to Green Bay’s defense: in his first season as coordinator, the Packers jumped from 17th to fifth in total defense, 28th to seventh against the run and 23rd to fourth in takeaways.

That also explains why the Dolphins’ new identity is being built around words like toughness and physicality. NFL.com noted that Miami had developed a reputation for being too soft and for struggling in cold-weather games, while Hafley’s Green Bay defense offered the kind of hard-nosed reset the organization was looking for. Sullivan has been even more direct about the philosophy: “We’re going one way, and it’s going to be the hard way.”

But Hafley isn’t simply taking over the roster McDaniel left behind. The Dolphins have ripped apart much of the offensive core of that era, releasing Tua Tagovailoa and Tyreek Hill and trading Jaylen Waddle to Denver. Miami replaced Tagovailoa with Malik Willis, while the Waddle trade brought back a first-round pick and more draft capital.

The scale of that reset is easy to miss. More than half of Miami’s 2026 salary-cap space is going toward players no longer on the roster, including $54 million owed to Tagovailoa, while the quarterback change alone created a record $99 million dead-cap hit spread over two seasons. The new regime is therefore trying to change the team’s identity while simultaneously building much of the roster from scratch.

Hafley doesn’t want that described as a rebuilding year. He has pushed back on the label, arguing that no competitive coach or player can enter a season accepting that they are simply “going to rebuild.” The practices have reflected that mentality too: Miami has emphasized 11-on-11 work over traditional 7-on-7 drills, with Hafley saying he wants the situations to feel as close to real football as possible. That puts Hafley in a strange position. 

He is trying to create something new while taking advice from the men who helped define Miami’s old football world. Wannstedt gave him one of his earliest breaks in coaching and remains one of his biggest mentors; Johnson is now another sounding board. Hafley said the Key Largo lunch lasted about an hour and 15 minutes, and that he asked Johnson about coaching, players and game-day decisions. “I’m at lunch with Jimmy Johnson. That’s pretty cool,” he later told his wife.

So Johnson’s question now hangs over Hafley’s first season too. Wannstedt’s 42-31 record is part of Dolphins history, but so is the 2004 collapse that ended his tenure. The seven coaches who followed him had their own opportunities and their own failures. Hafley has inherited a very different team from any of them, but the standard remains exactly the same: eventually, somebody has to win another playoff game.