Dolphins Get New Coach; Fans Want to Own Team

By Spencer Hall
I should mention they hired a new head coach today, but those things--head coaches, that is--are but fleeting things when it comes to the Dolphins. For formality’s sake: Tony Sparano gets the next shot at attempting to fill the Shula seat in Miami. Sparano was the Dallas Cowboys’ offensive line coach in 2007 and was also the assistant head coach of the Cowboys during Bill Parcells’ tenure as the head coach in Dallas.
[img=http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/4441/dolphinscoachfootbamottdm7.jpg]
Parcells, now the executive vice president of football operations with the Dolphins, hired from “his guys,” as he usually does. Sparano is someone he feels extremely comfortable with and has worked with before. Most people who’ve been in their professions for a while do this when they hire people, of course, but Parcells practically runs his own football Monster.com, so extensive is his network at this point. Sparano’s hire does not qualify as a surprise.
Formalities concluded, we command sports business geeks to pay heed to the really interesting news: a website may be trying to turn the Dolphins into the second public-owned franchise in the NFL. Buy the Fins is testing the waters (horrible pun intended) as to how interested Miami fans would be in purchasing shares in the team, a move Dolphins season ticket holder Stan D’Alo says only makes sense given the rising costs of operating a pro sports franchise.
[quote="D’Alo"]“The league doesn’t want to have this kind of ownership,†said D’Alo, a season ticket holder for nine years. “[But] If they want the kind of money they will ask for franchises in the future they aren’t going find a lot of people who are going to be able to lay out that kind of money. It’s going to take corporations to buy teams in the future.â€[/quote]
For the moment, the only publicly owned NFL franchise is the Green Bay Packers.
> Buy the Miami Dolphins | BuytheFins.com↵