The owner can make a difference

The reaction to my column in Tuesday's Herald was fast and, sometimes furious. A large majority of readers agreed the Dolphins need to get more expertise out of their experts and that owner Wayne Huizenga cannot be excused from responsibility for the current state of the team.

I have long applauded Huizenga's commitment to winning. That commitment is unrivaled in the NFL when one considers the Dolphins are always allowed to spend to the NFL salary cap limit, they continuously update their facilities including the Nick Saban memorial bubble, and now the stadium is undergoing significant improvements.

But what I have come to realize is there is a difference between being a good hands-off owner and an owner who is far too uninvolved.

Huizenga has slid from being the former and is now, too often, the latter. Sure, he talks to coach Cam Cameron during the week. Sure, he meets with team officials on a semi-regular basis to catch up on the financial operations of the team.

But he simply is not around enough to know for himself what is right and wrong with the crown jewel of his business empire. He is told by others what is right and wrong so whatever opinions he has about the team are based on what he is told rather than what he sees.

He is not around enough to form HIS OWN opinion, without getting it from employees who have an agenda in what they tell Huizenga.

{That agenda, by the way, is usually finding a way to keep one's job}

If you study the teams who have won the Super Bowl lately -- say, since 2002 when the Dolphins started their string of playoff absences -- you see teams whose owners are around and engaged.

Robert Kraft in New England? He's on the job and around the team practically every day. Dan Rooney in Pittsburgh? The Steelers are his passion and, in a new book, he confesses he made a mistake in 1983 by not making a stronger case to his personnel department about drafting Dan Marino.

Twenty years later, he refused to make the same mistake. "I couldn't bear the thought of passing on another great quarterback prospect the way we had passed on Dan Marino in 1983, so I steered the conversation around to (Ben) Roethlisberger," Rooney writes in My 75 Years With The Pittsburgh Steelers And The NFL.

Guess what, the owner steers the conversation a certain direction, the personnel department picks the object of that conversation.

Tampa Bay's Malcolm Glazer hasn't been very close to the Bucs since a stroke hampered his health in 2006. But Glazer's sons Bryan and Joel are very much involved in the daily operations of the team. They know the rights and wrongs of the team based on daily contact.

Indy owner Jim Irsay began working for the Colts in 1982, first at the ticket counter and in public relations. He was named general manager in 1984 one month after the Colts moved to Indianapolis and assumed day-to-day management of the team after his father's stroke in 1995.

Irsay is not the general manager of the team anymore as he wisely hired Bill Polian for that job. But ask him what his job is, ask him what his business is, ask what his professional passion is, and his answer to all three questions is the same.

"The Indianapolis Colts."

I am not saying Huizenga should be running the organization, or sitting in on team meetings or drawing up plays. That's ridiculous. But it is equally ridiculous for an owner to lean so far in the other direction as to lose CLOSE contact with that which should be MOST important to him.