New Names But Still No Names

Don Shula is having fun again, and you know what that means. It means nobody else is going to have as much. Here's Don now, having fun with David and Andra and Tommy and Eric and Nat and Old Don and the various other pledges and pickups on the Miami Dolphins' No-Name Offense. You'll remember that the last time Don was having fun it was the defense that everybody called No-Name. Either way it works the same. When Don is having fun they all get names sooner or later. See Andra and David and the others run over the Cardinals. See them run over the Steelers, Oilers and Colts. See them tie the New York Jets last Sunday 28-28. (Well, hell. After six straight losses to the Jets, even that's progress.) See the 4-0-1 Dolphins emerge after five weeks as the only undefeated team in the American Football Conference. The last time they were undefeated after five games, the Dolphins went 17-0, including the 1973 Super Bowl. Fun, Don, fun.

As breathtaking as the tie with the Jets was—it went into the night and through a hairy overtime in the Orange Bowl and wasn't sealed until the Jets' Pat Leahy missed, rather profoundly, a 48-yard field goal on the final play—you would be within reason to wonder what there is to get so excited over.

Not much, perhaps. The Dolphins, after all, were 8-8 last year and at the start of this season were believed to be still on the grease rack undergoing an overhaul. Surely a hungry Dolphin fan shouldn't derive too much nourishment from a game in which a lowly opponent, the 1-3 Jets, ran for 242 yards, gained 546 overall, the second-highest total by an opponent in Dolphin history, and made 32 first downs, the first-highest total in that category.

But there's a little for that beleaguered fan to take heart from when one assesses the way the Dolphins played the previous four weeks and realizes the progress they've made so quickly, especially on offense. Too, the Jets' 6½-game mastery of Shula's teams makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, so why worry about it? As Shula said afterward, a tie in this case is "a step in the right direction." He says the riddle is not so much why the Jets beat the Dolphins as why they don't beat anybody else.

And that fan can draw a lot of hope from the fact that the vu from where the Dolphins sit is mostly déjà: Shula doing what comes naturally. Shula once more not willing to wait his turn to win. Shula winning. The NFL Coach of the Decade of the 1970s is 51 now in this, his 12th season in Miami. His middle-age jaw is still granite, but his midriff is more roll than rock and his hair is turning. "Look, gray!" he said in his office last week, twisting a tuft of sideburn as if he could have willed it to stay blond if he'd caught it in time. But he still knows the formula. He invented it.

Here's the way it works. Shula lumps together a bunch of guys you never heard of, rookies like running backs Andra Franklin and Tommy Vigorito, who started against the Jets in place of a couple of injured backs you probably never heard of either. He mixes them in with a second-year quarterback, David Woodley, whom you will be hearing about more and more (in this story and others), and older guys you thought had retired. Like Nat Moore, the butternut-smooth wide receiver whose "decline" was said to be "official" by no less an authority than last week's Dolphin Digest, but who, in this wasted condition, proceeded to get a team-record 210 yards in receptions against the Jets. And Don Strock, the long reliever who used to spell Bob Griese but now picks up the pieces for Woodley, and who was on the throwing end of all the mad bombs to Moore last Sunday.

Then Shula rummages through the trash bins of the other NFL teams and adds a few more.

Then he coaches like mad.

And—presto!—the 82nd Airborne.

And every time one no-name goes down, Shula plugs in another, and the Dolphins win, and everybody says, "Who are those guys?"