There’s a long-standing truth about sports teams and the basic psychology of the fans who follow them, who live and die with every bounce of the ball, every hit, strikeout, touchdown, field goal, or buzzer-beating three point basket.
No matter how well or how poorly our favorite team is doing at any given moment, we will invariably have someone within the team’s power structure that we view as the ‘bad guy’, the villainous fellow without whom the team would surely be able to win a championship in the near future. Throughout the 1970s and into the ’80s, the bad guy among Miami Dolphin fans was usually the owner and team founder Joe Robbie, whereas, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the focus of fans’ ire moved to whomever Miami’s defensive coordinator was at the time since this was a period in which the Dolphins had the best quarterback in the league, in Dan Marino but seldom had much success in the postseason due to being absolutely putrid on defense most years.