FMIA Week 2: Mike McDaniel’s ‘F— You’ Play Powers Dolphins’ Comeback and How 49ers Adjust Without Trey Lance

Saturday night, Marriott Hotel, suburban Baltimore. Last Dolphins team meeting before facing the Ravens. “I want to see us respond when we don’t have the lead,” Miami coach Mike McDaniel said. “This is the National Football League. It happens. And believe me, fellas, there’s nothing as good as silencing a crowd on the road when the clock hits zero.”

Sunday afternoon, halftime, M&T Bank Stadium, Baltimore. Ravens 28, Dolphins 7. A pall over the locker room. McDaniel told his players to forget the scoreboard and just play, and whatever happens, happens, and he had faith in them to play great in the second half. Afterward, he told me he was concerned with what he saw in his players as major adversity struck. “I thought our guys were defeated, and I understood why,” McDaniel told me. “They had high hopes for the game, and it wasn’t starting out that way.”

Then the “F-it” play happened.

This is a family website, and so McDaniel will have to leave a small bit to the imagination here. But the big play of Miami’s ridiculous comeback, honestly, was called the “F— it” play.

Midway through the fourth quarter, Miami was still down 14, and sputtering, Tua Tagovailoa going incomplete-incomplete, with the clock under eight minutes now, with a third-and-10 at the Baltimore 48-yard line.

“So we had a play ready, in case things weren’t going right, or in case there were various frustrations,” McDaniel said, an hour after the game, just outside the team bus waiting to take the team to the airport. “We installed that play with the expletives, that the quarterbacks knew as the “F— it” play. Tua loved the play. If we really needed to make something happen, that was the play we’d call.”

Well, f—. What the quarterback wants, the quarterback