The Eagles had better be ready for a show against the fast and fun Dolphins

The Miami Dolphins play the Eagles on Sunday night, and the Miami Dolphins are good. How good? We’ll see. They are 5-1, but their five victories have come against five teams that are among the most underwhelming in the NFL: the Los Angeles Chargers, the New England Patriots, the Denver Broncos, the New York Giants, the Carolina Panthers. Those opponents have a combined record of 5-24. Ugh.

Miami’s only loss is to the Buffalo Bills, who are the only above-average team that the Dolphins have faced. Until they face the Eagles.

What no one can deny is that the Miami Dolphins are fun. Their head coach, Mike McDaniel, is young and smart and funny and self-effacing. Their offense scores more points, gains more yards, and uses more motion than any other in the league.

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They have speed to burn: Tyreek Hill, Jaylen Waddle, Raheem Mostert, De’Von Achane (who is out for this game). And they’re doing all this in a season when offensive output, by any number of measures, has declined throughout the NFL. As Eric Tice of Yahoo Sports detailed, teams are putting up fewer points a game than in any season since 2010, the league’s overall explosive-play percentage is at its lowest rate since 2000, and teams are scoring touchdowns in the red zone just 53.3% of the time, the worst such rate since 2012.

The obvious and correct historical comparison to this year’s Dolphins is the 1999 St. Louis Rams, the Rams of Kurt Warner, Marshall Faulk, Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt, Mike Martz, and Dick Vermeil. “They’re very innovative,” Warner told the Palm Beach Post last month when asked about the Dolphins. “They’re doing things that nobody else is doing. And you know, a lot of these things kind of bring me back to The Greatest Show on Turf.”

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The ‘99 Rams seemed a bolt of lightning — 4-12 the year before, a quarterback no one had heard of, skill-position players turbocharging a system that allowed St. Louis to score quickly at a time when teams were relying on more deliberate approaches to win.

Remember: For all John Elway’s greatness, and as good as he was even at the end of his career, the Denver Broncos had won back-to-back Super Bowls after the 1997 and ‘98 seasons largely because of Mike Shanahan’s zone-blocking run scheme and the best back to benefit from it, Terrell Davis. Then, the next three teams to win Super Bowls after the ‘99 Rams — the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, the 2001 New England Patriots, and the 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers — were built primarily around their defenses.

These Dolphins, so far, aren’t so different from those Rams, even down to the doubts about whether they can sustain their excellence. Miami was 9-8 and lost in the wild-card round last season. St. Louis had a last-place schedule in ‘99, so it took that team a while to persuade people that it was for real.

An Eagles loss Sunday night at Lincoln Financial Field would bum out everyone around here, but it would also put the rest of the NFL on notice that the Dolphins probably aren’t going anywhere.

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The Eagles host the Miami Dolphins on Sunday. Join Eagles beat reporters Olivia Reiner and EJ Smith as they dissect the hottest storylines surrounding the team on Gameday Central, live from Lincoln Financial Field.