Nick Saban was three minutes into a monologue on the sorry state of the Miami Dolphins when his voice began to rise, as if he were rehearsing for a speech to his team.
``It's only going to change when everybody decides, `I'm going to change,''' Saban said. ``If somebody doesn't want to change, they're not going to change. And if they don't do it, then we need to play somebody else.''
Alas for the Dolphins, a lot needs to change. Problems cited Monday by Saban included dropped balls, wrong routes, missed blocks, bad passes, poor coverage, miscommunication, imbalance on offence and soft third-down defence.
No wonder Miami is 1-3. A team hyped before the season as a Super Bowl contender instead finds itself reeling after a 17-15 defeat against previously winless Houston.
``Whatever anyone thinks is the worst team in the league, that's us,'' defensive end Jason Taylor said.
The Dolphins' slow start is all the more distressing because they've failed to take advantage of a soft schedule. The four teams they've played are a combined 4-11 _ and 1-10 against teams other than Miami.
Now the road to the playoffs becomes tougher. The next two weeks, the Dolphins play at New England and at the New York Jets. In Saban's analogy, the goal line is far away.
``The field is 100 yards,'' he said. ``Some teams are up to the 35-yard line now. We're at about the 12. We've still got 88 yards to go.''
Twenty games into his Dolphins career, Saban is a .500 coach. The question is whether he can orchestrate a turnaround comparable to last year, when the Dolphins started 3-7 in his first season, then won their final six games.
``Everybody's got to have a sense of urgency to play intelligently,'' he said. ``I said that last year, over and over and over. And when we got that, we started to play better and have success.
``When it clicks, good things are going to start happening.''
Saban's blanket solution is more disciplined execution. That goes for an offence that has produced five touchdowns in four games, and for a defence that has allowed four opposing quarterbacks _ Charlie Batch, J.P. Losman, Kerry Collins and David Carr _ to combine for a passer rating of 93.8.
Saban said Miami's quarterback, Daunte Culpepper, played probably his best game of the season Sunday while throwing for 249 yards. But five sacks raised his season total to 21, leaving him on pace to break the NFL record set by Carr with 76 in 2002.
Miami gave up only 26 sacks all of last year, but Saban acknowledges that Culpepper has lost mobility in his return from knee surgery, and opponents are mounting constant pressure with relentless blitzing. Meanwhile, Ronnie Brown is on pace to finish with less than 1,000 yards rushing despite a heavy workload.
``Some things we need to fix,'' Saban said. ``We're going to try to fix it where we can fix it.''
The Dolphins totalled 133 yards in the first 50 minutes Sunday against one of the NFL's weakest defences, then staged a rally that fell short when Saban opted for a trick play on a two-point conversion attempt that could have tied the game. Brown's first NFL pass fell incomplete.
Former Detroit Lions quarterback Joey Harrington has played on bad teams, and in his first season in Miami, he said the Dolphins are responding to their poor start well.
``The thing I liked about the team meeting today was that the first thing said was, `Guys, we're in this together,''' he said. ``I haven't seen anybody pointing a finger. Everybody knows it's not just one thing. We have made mistakes in a lot of different areas that have put us in the position we're in.''
