For Inter Miami, the Dolphins and Hurricanes in 2024, anything less than great is failure | Opinion

Miami’s three marquee football teams — the Dolphins and Hurricanes in the wake of their seasons and Inter Miami on the futbol side at the beginning of theirs — all are confronting very different challenges in the new year. At the intersection for each: Great excitement and big potential but rising pressure, too.

This is where men as disparate as Lionel Messi, Mario Cristobal and Tua Tagovailoa find common ground in the great responsibility facing each of their teams.

Because each team is good enough where all that’s left is great, and anything less is failure. Let us explore...

▪ Inter Miami: The last, best chance: The fourth-year soccer club begins its second season — and first and likely last full one — with incomparable Lionel Messi out front. And it is showing him off to the max, making money and turning what was an MLS franchise of little renown into a global brand.

But has the team not learned the lesson of last fall?

By the end of last season Messi and crew had no legs left as they tried and failed to reach the league playoffs, interspersing MLS matches with a flurry of seven Leagues Cup games and six U.S. Open Cup matches.

Coach Tata Martino admitted that by the end of last season he saw “a team that was spent.”

Yet now the club embarks on an extraordinary seven-game preseason tour that will see exhibitions across five countries and covering almost 25,000 miles. It is grueling, a tour as tour-ment. One year ago, before Messi’s arrival, Inter Miami’s entire preseason consisted one of home friendly.

This time the tour opened Friday with a scoreless draw in El Salvador as thousands of Messi idolaters swooned and chanted their Messi-ah’s name as the team’s pink buses arrived at their hotel. Monday night the club plays in Dallas, for a friendly moved to the venerable Cotton Bowl to accommodate the ticket demand. Then it will be on to Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong and Japan before heading home just in time for the February 21 MLS season opener.

The tour is a windfall for club profits and to further grow the brand. But is it smart for the team?

Messi, Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba and now Luis Suarez form the star nucleus of an aging squad in must-win mode. Suarez turns 37 on Wednesday. This summer Messi will turn 37 and Busquets and Alba both 36. After the preseason tour will come 34 regular-season league matches plus CONCACAF Champions Cup tournament games interspersed.

“We understand the business and sports sides, and try to satisfy both,” says Martino, knowing full well those interests are often at odds — as with a 25,000-mile preseason tour.

This is the last, best chance for Inter Miami to win its first MLS Cup championship — and it must, or forever be the club that could not win despite having Messi, et al. But to do it those old legs must be fresh legs at the end, not “a team that was spent” like last year ... when a lesson was there to learn.

▪ Hurricanes: Year 3 and triple the onus on Cristobal: The College Football Playoff next season will expand from four teams to 12, tripling the pressure on schools that are outside of the elite top tier but believing they should be there. And those wannabe’s absolutely include Miami, a five-time national champion but not since 2001, before almost all of the current Canes were born.,

A champion player that season, Mario Cristobal returned to his alma mater on a metaphoric white steed to resurrect the glory days, but it would severely understate it to call his first two seasons underwhelming: A 5-7 debut and then modest improvement to 7-6, capped by a bowl loss to Rutgers (not to mention the no-kneel debacle vs. Georgia Tech). The sad math: 12-13 overall, 6-10 in the ACC and 1-5 vs. ranked opponents entering Cristobal’s Year 3.

So why the expectations of a sudden surge to CFP territory?

A). Canes football fans spoiled by five rings think greatness is a birthright, and two decades of disappointment has not yet beaten it out of them.

B). More tangibly, Cristobal’s 2024 recruiting class was ranked No. 6 nationally (and tops in the ACC) by ESPN, after his 2023 bounty was rated No. 5. That’s a talent stockpile. Only a failure in player development or coaching does not parlay that into significant improvement.

UM also scored a a major transfer portal get in quarterback Cam Ward.

That makes 2024 the season the Canes and Cristobal must break through big time. I’m talking about at least a 10-win season that has Miami on the radar for the 12-0 team CFP.

Much less than that and (I predict) there will be talk of swallowing the enormous buyout cost and moving on from Cristobal.

▪ Dolphins: Alone now on Woebegone Island: Like the tattoo you wish you had never gotten and can’t get rid of, the Dolphins last won a playoff game in 2000. It brands a once-proud on the franchise. But at least there was always somebody worse, an NFL team whose drought was even longer.

No more. Just us now. Detroit got off the island and left us alone.

The measure of a successful season used to be making the playoffs. Not enough now.

Winning in the playoffs will be necessary in 2024. It will elevate or cast in some doubt the future of coach Mike McDaniel. It will be how Tua Tagovailoa is judged.

Signed through the ‘24 season, Miami should be offering a major contract extension now to lock up the young QB who just made the Pro Bowl and led the NFL in passing yards. If the club waits, it will be because it needs more proof.

That proof might have been a home win over rival Buffalo to secure a home playoff game, but Tagovailoa fell short. Then that proof might have come with a road playoff win in Kansas City — at long last a playoff win! — but Tagovailoa didn’t get that, either.

Miami has had 11 different head coaches (counting interims) since it last won in the postseason. The Fins have had 24 different starting QBs since Jay Fiedler won a playoff game in 2000. In order: Fiedler, Ray Lucas, Brian Griese, A.J. Feeley, Sage Rosenfels, Gus Frerotte, Joey Harrington, Daunte Culpepper, Cleo Lemon, Trent Green, John Beck, Chad Pennington, Chad Henne, Tyler Thigpen, Matt Moore, Ryan Tannehill, Jay Cutler, Brock Osweiler, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Josh Rosen, Tagovailoa, Jacoby Brissett, Teddy Bridgewater and Skylar Thompson.

It’s on McDaniel and Tagovailoa, in 2024, to free the Dolphins from the past near-quarter century of playoff failure.

Inter Miami winning a championship with Messi ... Cristobal leading UM to the College Football Playoff ... or Tagovailoa winning in the postseason.

Which team needs it most? All of them. Now.