Dolphins elect captains for the season

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The Miami Dolphins are preparing for their first regular season game of 2016, facing off against the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday. One of the last items on the preseason schedule for the team was the selection of team captains for the year, with the players voting on their representatives themselves.

On Wednesday, head coach Adam Gase told the media the five players who were selected as the captains, two on offense, two on defense, and one on special teams. The offensive captains selected were quarterback Ryan Tannehill and center Mike Pouncey, with the defensive captains being defensive end Cameron Wake and safety Reshad Jones, and the special teams captain going to safety Michael Thomas.

“You just never know,” Gase said when asked if the vote went the way he expected. “You never know how the voting’s going to go because you think the guys that you interact with a lot of the times kind of assert themselves as leaders but sometimes you’re not really sure what guys gravitate to who. So the fact that there were – you know we did have a good variety of who people voted for, which is encouraging because that means a lot of guys look up to different guys besides just those five – but I think those five guys, at least in my experience here, so far they stood out as leaders for me. Those are the guys that were always either approaching me or you could always see them working with younger guys. I guess I wasn’t really surprised by who was voted in.”

“It’s definitely a huge honor,” Thomas told the team’s website. “I felt blessed, felt humbled that all my teammates voted for me to become their captain, the special teams captain. I get to wear the ‘C’ on my chest. Anytime you get an honor like that from your peers, it’s humbling. It’s huge.

“I put in work just like Spencer Paysinger has put that work in, Walt Aikens has put in that work to be special teams captain. And obviously you’ve got old man (John) Denney; he’s been here forever. It could have been any of those guys plus a few others. I wasn’t expecting it, I didn’t feel entitled to it, but definitely once my name was called, it felt great.”

During much of the Joe Philbin era with the team, the Dolphins had a “Leadership Council” with permanent members each year, but the captains were rotated weekly based on the coaches’ evaluation of practices and the previous game.