Miami Dolphins June 2012 Approval Ratings

Over the last few days, the Phinsider Community has conducted the monthly approval ratings votes for the top three executives within the Miami Dolphins organization. This is the second time we have done these posts, so it's the first time we can compare one month's results to the previous ratings.

Not surprisingly, our vote count went down drastically this month, but since we are in the middle of June - the only real "dead" month of the NFL year - it was kind of expected. In May, the three separate polls ranked from 1,192 votes to 1,539 votes. This month, the highest vote total was the 716 votes cast in the Jeff Ireland post. The lowest total went to Joe Philbin, with 636 votes.

On to the results themselves:

All three of the Miami power brokers saw at least a minor rise in their approval, with Ross obviously jumping up the most. For Ross, this is most likely a reaction to his efforts to open up the Dolphins organization, and move away from the stonewall methods of Bill Parcells. Ross has spoken to the media more often lately, and has held conference calls with season ticket holders, all in an effort to reach out to a fan base that has grown tired of not knowing anything about their favorite franchise, and not really having much of a relationship with it.

If our poll - which, again, can't really show a trend because it's only a two month comparison - gives any sense of what the fan base is feeling, Ross' efforts are starting to work.

Meanwhile, Ireland, who nearly had fans storming his house with pitchforks and torches before the NFL draft, has suddenly jumped up above 70% approval, and fans seems to be much more behind the general manager.

As for head coach Philbin, his approval rating is not that surprising, given he has yet to coach a single game in the league. However, fans have heard a lot from the coach at the podium and in interviews with the press. During media open practices, decisions Philbin is making, like moving Jimmy Wilson to safety and changing Koa Misi from a pass rusher to a coverage/run stopping linebacker, seem to be resonating with the fans.

Philbin's disapproval rating and his "not sure" vote were interesting as well this month. Philbin actually went from 0% disapprove of the coach, to 1%. Now, that could be a matter of the smaller sample size, but it is interesting to see percentage wise (and vote wise, from 5 in May to 8 in June), more fans are disapproving of Philbin now than they did last month - with not a lot of things to point to as reasons to disapprove of the coach.

It's also interesting that Philbin had the lowest percentage of people expecting to vote "not sure." For a head coach who has yet to coach a single game in the NFL, it could have been expected that he would have the highest percentage of undecided voters over the other two personnel.

Just interesting.

We'll be able to start looking for "trends" next month as the approval ratings post move into their third month - and the final votes before the season truly gets going.