The #MetLifeTakeover was a huge success this year and I just want to thank all of you for making it amazing. We weren’t able to get as many tickets this year because the Jets thought they were gonna be good this year (lol), but we sold out before the season even started and gave out our section number to the hundreds and hundreds of people who emailed us requesting tickets too late. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had 2500 Dolphins fans sitting together because our sections were packed. With the great tailgate and the Dolphins dominating on the field it was just an amazing day.
Speaking of the tailgate, we had a huge crowd all day and a video I took from the top of our U-Haul went viral, being reposted by tons of national media outlets, and even a local TV station reached out about using it, although I have no idea if they actually did. Speaking of TV, the film crew from HBO’s Hard Knocks came out to the tailgate, interviewed Michelle and I as well as some other fans and did a short segment during episode two of the show. If you didn’t watch the episode you can watch the short segment here.
We had some cool guests at the tailgate this year. Dolphins legends Joe Rose and Nat Moore never miss a tailgate but we also had a couple of social media stars, with Kickball Dad returning to the Takeover to film some videos, and elementary teacher extraordinaire Mary Martinez celebrated her 30th birthday with us. We had two Miami Dolphins Fans of the Year in attendance, Dolphreaky and the newest Fan of the Year Chris Barker. Solo D performed as he always does and my cousin came out because her husband is a huge Dolphins fan and that was really cool for me.
On the charity front, we raised over $6000 just from raffle and merch sales and that doesn’t include the money we made from ticket sales. We are unfortunately dealing with some possible unexpected expenses because of an unfortunately incident that we won’t get into, but we should be able to donate over $10,000 to charity this year. We will be announcing donations as they happen on Twitter but hopefully at the end of the year I can do a run down of the good that money is doing. By the way, all donations to us are tax deductible so if anyone is interested in donating please reach out.
Shout out to DJ Drell, our new regular Slattery’s DJ for killing it at his first #MetLifeTakeover and Solo D for his yearly performance. Solo came to the second or third one of these we ever did and hasn’t missed one since. He’s become such a huge part of our tailgate experience. Thanks as always to our tailgate partners Urban Tailgate. Those guys take everything off our plate and handle all the food, drinks, games and simple stuff like getting there hours before the gates open to make sure we get our regular spot. And lastly, huge thanks to all our volunteers who we couldn’t do any of this without. From our bus captains, to the people selling merch and raffle tickets, to just random people who grab a bin from the bus and bring it over to the tailgate for us, we appreciate you guys a ton.
Anyway, I did a terrible job of documenting the event, but I did technically take some photos, so I got a gallery of stuff for you guys to look through. Don’t worry though, we will have one hell of a recap video for you guys coming a lot sooner than last year’s video. I can’t wait for you to see it.

After that we went to every NFL Draft in NYC using it to try and get on TV, not for the “fame” but so that Dolphins fans at home watching might realize that there was a club of Dolphins fans in NYC and maybe they should type Dolfans NYC into google and try and find us. Our group got bigger and bigger every year. One year a cop stopped me at the Draft and I thought I had done something wrong. Turns out he just wanted to know where he could get a new Dolfans NYC shirt because his old one got damaged in the wash.

When the NFL Draft was in NYC we started organizing group trips starting with the 2008 Draft when we picked Jake Long with the first pick in the Draft. We didn’t even have a club yet. The next year we printed a bunch of flyers and handed them out to everyone to promote the club which we had just started. We kept doing this and using it as outreach for the club until the Draft moved out of NYC. In 2019 I got invited to go to Dallas to be part of the Inner Circle and it was a great experience and I couldn’t wait to do it again in Vegas last year. Michelle was coming too and we had a bunch of plans for meet ups and fun things like that, and then Covid happened. I did get to be part of the screen behind Goodell instead, but not quite the same thing.
I personally do not care one way or another about getting on TV but I do care about getting the Dolfans NYC logo on TV. Our group trips to the Draft were such a good way to grow the club and my hope is that if people at home in NY see a Dolfans NYC hat or t-shirt on ESPN they might look up the club and realize that there are Dolphins fans in their backyard and they had no idea. It’s all about spreading the word. So I thought it was very cool that I got some TV time during the first pick, what I didn’t expect was getting even more TV time on the actual Draft stage!



