Gase swears onside kick was all about football, not revenge

Dolphins coach Adam Gase is sticking to his story that his call for an onside kick with the Dolphins holding a 33-9 lead over the Broncos on Sunday was all about the importance of playing 60 minutes of football.

 “My whole point was, our guys have to understand that you have to play a whole game for 60 minutes,’’ Gase said Monday, reiterating the point he made after the game on Sunday.

Gase said of the controversial call then that he has no intentions of “slowing down’’ or letting up on a team when he has his foot poised over their throat no matter “what the score is.’’

That may be true, but there’s plenty of reason to believe that this was an attempt by Gase to try to humiliate his old boss, Broncos general manager John Elway.

As Armando Salguero noted in a column in the Miami Herald today, the root of that in-your-face onside kick call may lie in an incident that took place back in January of 2015.

Gase was the Broncos offensive coordinator at the time and a hot one, hot enough to have earned a second interview with the 49ers for their head coaching job, which was all but his if he wanted it.

Except the job wound up going to Jim Tomsula who, according to Salguero’s sources, only got the job after Elway bad-mouthed Gase when then 49ers GM Trent Baalke came calling about him.

That, at least, is what Gase has reportedly told people close to him and the reason he didn’t say or do anything about it then was because he thought Elway wanted to keep Gase for his own.

Elway did in fact interview Gase for the Broncos head coach’s job but he gave it instead to Gary Kubiak, who let Gase leave for the OC job in Chicago that he held before he took over as coach of the Dolphins.

It’s interesting that Broncos coach Vance Joseph didn’t seem to have a problem with the onside kick. At least, he didn’t seem to have a problem with it after the game on Sunday.

That could be because he knows how Gase, a close friend and his defensive coordinator a year ago, feels about Elway and that the maneuver wasn’t meant to embarrass Joseph and his team but was meant solely for Elway.