Miami Dolphins
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By :
Freddie Brister
Submitted
2010-03-12 16:44:27 |
This pro football team began play in 1966 in the American Football League as an expansion team. Their home field is the Dolphin Stadium located in the suburbs of Miami in Miami Gardens. Their headquarters are in Davie, Florida and are called the Miami Dolphins Training Facility. Founded by Joseph Robbie in 1966, they belong to the Easter division of the American Football Conference of the NFL. They were a part of the original AFL NFL merger. They are the oldest pro sports franchise of any type of major league sports club in the state of Florida.
Their history is a colorful one. In 1965 the AFL awarded a team franchise to a lawyer by the name of Joseph Robbie and the actor Danny Thomas for $7.5 million dollars. A contest in 1965 was held to determine the new name for the as yet unnamed team. 19,843 entries made it into the pot with over a thousand different names proposed. There were a dozen finalists that make it to the last pile. The names were the Marauders, Missiles, Mariners, Mustangs, Moons, Suns, and Sharks. However, the number 622 entrant was the one chosen – The Dolphins. Mrs. Robert Swanson, for her effort, won lifetime passes to all the future Dolphin games because of the strangest of reasons. Her nickname entry was chosen because she successfully predicted the score and the winner of the football game in 1965 between rivals the University of Miami and Notre Dame – which was a scoreless tie.
The first four seasons for the Dolphins were winning ones under their first head coach, George Wilson. Then Shula was hired and hard work ensued for the team. He was a stickler for early training camps, four workouts a day, and punctuality. But the entire Dolphin’s hard work paid off immediately because his first year as coach of the team saw them finish the year with a 10 4 record. They also had their first playoff appearance that year in Oakland and only lost by one score, 21 14.
Their first Super Bowl appearance was in 1971. They played in Super bowl VI and lost to the Dallas Cowboys that year. The next year was a different story. They completed the first ever NFL’s perfect season record which ended in a Super Bowl win. They accomplished this by winning all of their 14 regular play season games followed by two playoff games and then won Super Bowl VII. They are the only team to have ever done this feat to the present. In 1872, the Dolphins held the fourth most perfect regular season record in the history of pro football.
The team also won Super Bowl VIII and this made them the first team to make an appearance in three consecutive Super Bowls and the second team ever to win back to back championships. They also made appearances in Super Bowl XVII and Super Bowl XIX, but lost both games.
For almost all of the Dolphins years of play, they were coached by Don Shula. He is considered by most to be the most successful pro football head coach in history. His team had only two losing seasons in the twenty six years that he was with the club. There have been 6 Hall of Famers that played for Miami during the 1970s and these include quarterback Bob Griese and running back Larry Csonka. In the 1980s and 1990s their quarterback Dan Marino was touted as being the most prolific passer in NFL history. He broke numerous passing records established in the league and he led the Dolphins to a lot of playoff berths and to Super bowl XIX. The Dolphins are considered by many to be Florida’s team. Maybe that is true, maybe not. But they are surely the best so far as their record stands.
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Author Resource:-
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