It hadn’t happened in 57 years before the Miami Dolphins tallied 70 points in a National Football League game last Sunday against the Denver Broncos. The last team to score that many points in an NFL game before Miami’s assault was the 1966 Washington Redskins, who downed the New York Giants, 72-41. The only other team to crack the 70 point margin in an NFL game was the Los Angeles Rams, they pinned the Baltimore Colts with a 70-27 defeat in 1950.

The 1966 Redskins and 1950 Rams were dramatically different teams. The Rams of 73 years ago were a top notch squad that advanced to that year's championship game only to fall to the Cleveland Browns, 30-28. Football historians will recognize the Browns team that edged the Rams in 1950 for the title. They were led by quarterback Otto Graham and runningback Marion Motley and were coached by a man his team was named after, Paul Brown.

The Redskins explosion of points in 1966 was somewhat unexpected. They were a team going nowhere, ended that season with as many wins as losses, seven, and yet had one shining moment when they pinned their most hated rival, the Giants, with that 72-41 thrashing.

One way we could look at this is that no team that scored 70 points in a season went on to win an NFL Championship. We also have a more contemporary example of scoring a lot of points doesn’t necessarily lead to good things to come. In the 1999 playoffs, the Jacksonville Jaguars downed the Miami Dolphins 65-7, a game that still ranks in NFL history as the largest margin of victory.

After that game, both Dolphins Quarterback Dan Marino and Head Coach Jimmy Johnson resigned. As for the Jaguars, they lost their next game to the eventual Super Bowl Champion Baltimore Ravens.

That is what the 2023 Dolphins have to guard against. Did they blow their wad against Sean Payton and his winless Broncos team?

I think not.

The Dolphins are a lot more in tune with the 1950 Rams than they are the 1966 Redskins. They are not simply a talented team that had a day, this is an organization that took chances and are now cashing those risks in the win column. Most observers thought Miami made a mistake when they tabbed Tua Tagovailoa over Justin Herbert in the 2020 NFL Draft.

Both signal callers appear headed for top notch NFL careers. While Herbert has been more durable, when healthy Tagovailoa brings a dynamic presence to the quarterback position. But, the move in Miami caused a civil war in the organization.

The former Dolphins head coach, Brian Flores, wanted Herbert, and when Tua was injured early in his career and Herbert won the starting job in Los Angeles, the tensions within the organization got unbearable between the head coach and personnel department. Most couldn't see from the outside why Brian Flores lost his job as Miami head coach. It was not that Flores wasn’t doing well with the team and raising the Dolphins win total, but it was this simmering problem with disagreement over the quarterback choice in the draft that prompted Miami to make a change.

The Dolphins made the decision to find a coach more aligned with the overall direction of the organization, and they hired Mike McDaniel from the San Francisco 49ers staff. McDaniel does not fit the typical look of an NFL coach and certainly does not mince his words to try and find the right things to say in interviews for any other reason than telling the truth.

His approach is both refreshing and successful, and he has the Dolphins looking like they may be on the path to a Super Bowl rematch against his old team and another head coach that breathes honesty into the equation, San Francisco’s Kyle Shanahan.

Three weeks into the 2023 season, if one can not see that the Dolphins and 49ers currently hold the best chance of meeting in Super Bowl LVIII, they aren’t paying attention. If it were to be the Dolphins and 49ers squaring off next February at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas it would be a rematch of the Super Bowl to complete the 1984 campaign. That year, Dan Marino made his only Super Bowl appearance and Joe Montana won his second of four Vince Lombardi Trophies.

One last note on the Dolphins 70 point effort against the Broncos, they had a chance to kick a field goal in the waning moments of the game, which would have eclipsed the Redskins 72 points as the highest scoring game in NFL history. Instead of kicking the field goal, the Dolphins took a knee.

“We are not interested in records, credit or stats,” McDaniel said in the postgame locker room.

We know what he is interested in, and from all initial appearances he is going to get a chance to achieve that against his old team on February 11, 2024.