Mike White – July 30, 2023
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Sunday, July 30, 2023
QB Mike White
(I heard QB Tua Tagovailoa praising your golf game the other day. Have you had a chance to get out this summer at all here?) – “No, I have not. In the summer I try to put it away just to spend time with my wife and kid, just because once this time hits, it’s kind of all ball. I wouldn’t be lying if I grabbed my seven iron and was just kind of in the house, but no, not a whole lot.”
(Was it a seven iron to WR Jaylen Waddle in the corner over there?) – “(laughter) Probably more like a five iron to him.”
(Can you tell us about that play a little bit more?) – “Yeah, that guy is unbelievable. We just ran this little concept, ‘Reek’ (Tyreek Hill) had a curl, Kader (Kohou) sat on ‘Reek,’ gave us the pylon and kind of – the one thing with those guys is there’s no outthrowing them. So you can throw it as far as you can and they will get it. Waddle showed what he’s so good at is tracking the ball and making contested catches. It was unbelievable. I can’t wait to watch it on film.”
(How did it feel to hit a big pass and play like that at the first practice in front of your hometown fanbase?) – “Yeah, it was nice. It was nice. Just being back here, I was telling the quarterbacks walking out, hearing the fans. Like that was me when I was a little kid going over to the Davie campus and going to practices and watching them. Hell, I got to meet fricken Zach Thomas. Like if you told 12-year-old Mike White that he got to meet Zach Thomas, he would lose his mind. So just the whole being back home, it’s really cool. It’s really cool.”
(Obviously you were priority for them. They signed you the first two hours of free agency. As they characterized it to you, did Head Coach Mike McDaniel say, “We’re signing you to be Tua’s backup?” Or did he characterize it as it’s going to be an open competition with you and QB Skylar Thompson for the No. 2 job?) – “Yeah, we didn’t really get too much into that. We just kind of got to talking about the offense and their philosophy and kind of how it differed from the Jets. It’s kind of the same base, but there’s a lot of different nuances here I think they’re able to do with guys like Jaylen (Waddle) and Tyreek (Hill) and the speed that they have, and adding Braxton (Berrios), ‘E’ (Erik Ezukanma), (Robbie) Chosen – just the whole room is so fast. So there’s stuff that they get to do here that we didn’t have the luxury of doing up there. That’s mainly what it was about, just kind of the nuances and kind of catching up to speed with that.”
(Is your expectation that you’ll be the No. 2 or do you think you’re in a highly competitive battle with QB Skylar Thompson for that job?) – “I just go out there and I try to complete my plays and run the offense to the best of my ability. Then come Week 1 when they explain it to us, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Football is way too hard to just start adding more stuff into it.”
(That Shanahan style offense has sprouted all across the NFL and obviously, you had that when you were in New York. Would you say the big nuance that you mentioned in Miami is pushing the ball downfield with the speed guys? Or is there anything that sticks out to you?) – “Yeah, pushing the ball downfield for sure, and then just the stuff that they can do with motions and how fast our guys are to be able to kind of cross the formation, snap the ball on the run and still be able to get to those 20- or 25-yard routes within the timing of the play, it’s absurd. I’ve never seen anything like it. I think that’s the main difference is what they can do. We look like a fricken four-by-four team out there. I remember watching, because there’s a lot of crossover obviously, when I was in New York, and we watched them a lot. Just the stuff that they would do, we were just like, ‘Oh my god.’ We would try to emulate it in scout team and you just can’t. So I’d say that’s the biggest thing.”
(What’s your skill or skills that you think is best suited for Head Coach Mike McDaniel’s offense?) – “I think just distributing the ball and getting the ball to the guys accurately with YAC angles is what we call it, yards after catch. I’m learning a lot from Tua (Tagovailoa) too. I think that’s what Tua does at such a high level, and it’s really impressive, just the anticipation and the accuracy. You can tell he’s just getting better, and it’s only going to get better with more reps and more time in the offense. The numbers they put up last year for the first year in this offense is super impressive, so I truly believe it’s only going to get better.”
(Are you pleased with your body of work May, June, throws you’ve made the first four days of camp, you would assess it how overall? Your overall body of work so far as a Dolphin.) – “I would say there’s some good and there’s some that I can improve on. I think a lot of it is just learning the guys and learning the offense. Shoot, this is only Day Four of camp. As much as we like to think that OTAs and minicamp are the same speed, it’s just not. It’s just different in training camp. You try to build on the reps, the mental reps you get in OTAs and apply here in training camp, but it’s still – if you start evaluating yourself after every practice and start to look too much into it instead of just, ‘What did I do good? What do I need to improve on? Let’s work on that next play.’ The one thing I’ve learned going into Year Six, it just gets too hard. It’s too mentally draining, and you’ll fall into a mental ditch, whatever you want to call it, and it’s hard to climb out of it.”
(You mentioned meeting Zach Thomas. Did you have something prepared for that moment?) – “No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I went up there, (laughter) I think (the PR staff) was trying to get me to come talk to you guys, and I was like, ‘I have to go introduce myself to Zach Thomas first. I can’t do anything else.’ So I went there, I had this whole thing like, ‘Hey, my name is Mike. I’m a big fan,’ all this, and he knew who I was, and that threw me off. He was like, ‘Oh, I was going to go talk to you on the sideline when y’all were down here last year with New York, but you were talking to your family.’ I was like, ‘Listen, I know we don’t know each other, but you can always interrupt me whenever I’m talking to anybody to come talk to me.’ So it was really, really cool.”
(Quarterbacks have a different perspective on things. I’m wondering how well you know CB Eli Apple from playing against him or film study and what do you think he brings to this secondary?) – “I was actually just talking to him on the way over here. We immediately started talking about my first start against them for the Bengals. He came up and he said, ‘Don’t think I don’t forget the 400 (yards) you put up on us.’ And I was like, ‘To be honest, the most impressive thing I thought I did was catch the two-point on you.’ (laughter) I’m gonna show him that picture, maybe I’ll have print it out and put it in his locker, me catching and him just probably 15 yards away, but I will tell him I caught it on him. (laughter) He’s a great dude. He’s been around a lot of ball, and one thing too is that he’s been on a lot of successful teams that have made runs, so he knows. At the end of the day, that’s the ultimate goal is making a run in the playoffs, and that’s adding another veteran who knows what it takes that’s been there, done it, been in a locker room that’s done it well and has veteran leaders. Any time you can add a guy like that to the locker room, it’s only going to benefit just the team and the defensive side of the ball.”
(How important was it for you guys to kind of bounce back after what the defense did at Friday’s practice?) – “Huge. I mean, that’s the name of the game. That’s football. You can go out and first scripted drive can go as planned, next drive you go three-and-out and the game doesn’t stop there. You have to go out next drive and that’s football. It’s ebbs and flows. That’s what you want in a practice, too. You don’t want one side of the ball to be dominating the entire time, because at the end of the day, we’re going to have to play other teams and we’re going to be rooting for our defense. So whenever you can have that kind of back and forth throughout training camp, like we got them today, they’ll get us tomorrow, you know what I mean? I think that makes it one, competitive and fun, and two, it’s good for the organization.”
(This has been a crazy year for South Florida sports. How ready is it for the Dolphins to just be that next team to have that successful postseason run?) – “I can only speak for the locker room, and I think we all kind of recognize the timing of everything and what we have at hand and the opportunity that’s in front of us, but you can’t look too past it. Our goal tomorrow is to build upon what we did today and I’m sure defensively, their goal is to stop us tomorrow. I think if you can keep that one day mindset and you build on it, that’s when good things come.”
