Thanks you all for coming out to the 2021 #MetLifeTakeover. What an absolute blast! From the party at Slattery’s to the tailgate to the Dolphins play on the field everything went off without a hitch. Despite a slightly less than normal turnout (the team’s record, the pandemic and the Jets only selling us 700 tickets didn’t help) we still had one of our most successful years. Thanks to you guys we raised over $6000 for charity between raffle, auction and merch sales. And that doesn’t even include the money we made off the tickets sold. That money is going back into our war chest to make new merch, raffle prizes and other expenses for next season, but it will all eventually be turned into even more money that we can use to do more good. The merch/raffle/auction money will be going to the Miami Dolphins Foundation, The Dolphins Cancer Challenge and the Jason Taylor Foundation.

So here’s a quick breakdown on the weekend. On Saturday night we had a great crowd at our bar Slattery’s Midtown Pub. We had DJ Syckturtle spin both that night and the tailgate the next day. We had a live auction that raised over $1000 on just three items and we had a big raffle as well for a bunch of great signed stuff. One of our members even brought a team signed ball from the Philbin era that had some great signatures on it despite how we may feel about those years. Another one of our members donated a Marino jersey that raised $275 in the live auction. Special shout out to Robert who bought it AND the Christian Wilkins signed jersey for $500!

One of the coolest parts of Saturday night, and the tailgate, was that the Miami Dolphins entire podcast network came out. We had Dolphins legend OJ McDuffie and his The Fish Tank co-host Seth Levit (and DJ DJ Prēc), Drive Time’s Travis Wingfield and Dolphins Today host Johanna Torres all come out and party with us both days. Nat Moore and Jason Jenkins also came out during the tailgate… those guys never miss one. Want to give a special shoutout to OJ who signed autograph after autograph and posed for picture after picture the entire time he was there. And another shout out to Seth who also runs the Jason Taylor Foundation who donated the Jason Taylor jersey to our game day raffle. He told us to give all the money to the Miami Dolphins Foundation in the DCC but we raised so much that we had to surprise him with donation to the JT Foundation as well.

The tailgate itself was an absolute party. We took over the entire parking lot between L4 and L7. It was massive. Our partners at Urban Tailgate killed it again. They were a little understaffed at the last minute and that led to some long lines, but the food was incredible. We will get that worked out for next year and make sure the lines aren’t nearly as bad. Huge shout out to our friends at Sailor Jerry for providing not only Sailor but also some bottles from their sister brands Reyka Vodka and Fistfull of Bourbon.

The game couldn’t have gone much better. The Jets hung around for a bit, but in the second half the Dolphins put them to bed and you could hear our “Let’s Go Dolphins!” chants on TV. Several of the Dolphins players Tweeted about us after the game and the #MetLifeTakeover hashtag absolutely exploded on Twitter. I couldn’t even keep up with it. We even got a little write up in the Miami New Times. Very cool.

So thanks again everyone for making this year one of the best years ever. I can’t wait to do it all again next year. I got a pretty good gallery of photos for you too. I have a back injury so I didn’t do a great job documenting it, but there are still some fun shots here. Also we have the 2021 #MetlifeTakeover video coming soon. That should be amazing. Now go check out the photos below! (Click here to view the gallery directly on Flickr where it looks less wonky than the embedded gallery viewer.)

I know most Dolphins fans have been looking forward this day for two years after knowing last year was going to be less than ideal. The day is finally here and instead of watching together at Slattery’s in a packed bar we are spread out all over the place

watching on couches trying to connect with our fellow Phins fans.

Well, today we are announcing our Dolfans NYC Discord server. All you have to do is Download the app Discord or just go to Discord.com and you can join a live Dolfans NYC chat room. If you haven’t used Discord before, it was originally used as a place to play video games with other people but has blown up in the Covid era as a way for people to keep in touch. Our server has chat rooms for the Dolphins, for general NFL and fantasy talk, as well as a place to argue with each other so we can keep the main rooms free from that. We also will have a “Celebrate” channel where you can turn on your audio when the Dolphins score and we can all sing the fight song together! It should be very cool.

Click this link to get invited into our room, and once you are there, just read the chat rules and click the checkmark saying you’ve read them and you are good to go! Can’t wait to talk to everyone on there.

We also have a few other things going on for game day today.

1. We have a 50/50 raffle to raise money for the west coast fire relief efforts. Tickets are $5 or 5 tickets for $20. We will draw after the game. We only take PayPal so send the money to dolfansnyc@gmail.com.
2. We made Dolfans NYC gifs! If you search “DolfansNYC” in the Giphy or Tenor gif searches they should come up. Giphy is Twitter’s search so it works on there and Tenor works on our Discord.
3. Michelle wants to put together a video of people’s game days experience today. So send a little video or some photos of your setup or celebration to dolfansnyc@gmail.com and she is going to edit them together into something. Sing the fight song when we score!

Okay, that’s it for now. We will hopefully have updates soon on what’s going on with Slattery’s once NYC allows indoor dining at the end of the month, and we plan on doing something for the #MetLifeTakeover, although we are not sure what that looks like yet. Can’t wait to see everyone in person again, but until then, see you on Discord!

Phins up!

The 2019 #MetLifeTakeover video is finally here! It took way longer than we wanted it’s been a crazy winter for all of us here at Dolfans NYC and I am just glad we finally got it done and I think you guys will see that it came out great. 2019 was not exactly a great year for the Dolphins, and this game didn’t go super great on the field, but despite our lower than normal numbers, we had one hell of a tailgate and having two full sections of Dolphins fans is still pretty damn impactful. You could easily hear us on  TV yelling from the upper decks.

The video includes interviews with Dolphins alumni Nat Moore, Dolfans NYC regular Shawn Wooden, and Joe Rose plus the Dolphins Jason Jenkin’s who presented us with a framed custom Dolphins jersey celebrating our 10th anniversary of our Jets game takeovers. The video also includes interviews with South Florida South Sentinel Dolphins writers Safid Deen and Omar Kelly and of course a ton of Dolphins fans.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped out, Oscar Collazos for hosting, Curtis from RizeOptix for directing and editing the video, Urban Tailgate for the great food and drink, Solo D for the live performance, Tropic 2.0 & DJ Syck Turtle for the tailgate music and Sailor Jerry for sponsoring the event. Also, a big shout out to Hotels.com for coming out and filming a video about us. And of course big thanks to the Miami Dolphins for all the support including setting up a live taping of The Joe Rose show in the middle of our tailgate.

We also want to thank all of you guys for helping us raise over $10,00 for charity this season. And we need to ask your help again. We are trying to raise money for the 14 members of the Slattery’s staff who have been laid off because of the Coronavirus. So far we have raised enough to give them each $200, but we would like to do more, so if you want to help out, please PayPal us whatever you can to DolfansNYC@gmail.com. We are going to randomly select one of the people who donate to win a prize once the world gets back to normal, but we don’t know what that is yet because we need to be able to get back into Slattery’s to see what we have to give away.

Okay! That’s it. Please take the time to watch the video, we put a lot of work into it. Plus, I have a feeling you guys don’t have anything else to be doing while you are stuck in quarantine! NYC and Florida are two of the hardest hit places so please, please stay safe out there! Phins up!

This is what you have been waiting for! For the 10th anniversary of Dolfans NYC we are doing not one, but TWO #MetLifeTakeover events!

The big one of course is the Jets game December 8th. It’s our 10th anniversary celebration and such a huge deal for us. We are pulling out all the stops. We hope this is our biggest year ever. We will have exclusive merch for the Takeover, are giving out 1000 thunder sticks and we hope to have some special guests for the tailgate. We even got a bigger discount on tickets this year year if you order by August 15th. With the early bird discount the Jets game tickets are only $60!

The Giants game is December 15th and while we ARE NOT offering game tickets, we are doing a huge tailgate. Our catering partners Urban Tailgate are doing back to back weeks with us and if you go to both tailgates you can save a ton of money using our exclusive coupons.

We are also offering round trip transportation to both games from our bar Slattery’s Midtown Pub. Unfortunately prices have gone up a little bit, but with the $10 early bird discount on tickets, you can still get to and from the game plus a ticket for $100. Plus we will free have bagels and coffee waiting for you when you get to Slattery’s.

And remember Dolfans NYC is a non-profit, so any money we raise from these events goes back to charity. For our 10th season our goal is to donate $10,000 to charity and we need your help!

Click here to get your tickets to the #MetLifeTakeover!

Every year we try to up the #MetLifeTakeover and so every year we try and raise the level of our annual #MetLifeTakeover video. It was pretty hard to outdo the last video, which was hosted by Dolphins legend Sam Madison, but I think we may have done it!

This year the #MetLifeTakoever was really on another level. Thanks to an early season game we had one of our biggest crowds with over 1100 people and thanks to our partnership with Urban Tailgate the party in the parking lot was out of control.

Both of the video teams from the last few years were unavailable and we sort of scrambled at the last minute to find a crew. Fortunately Curtis over at RizeOptix was recommended to us by one of our Twitter followers. He absolutely killed it with the video with a lot of help from our host Oscar Collazos. Oscar is a die hard Dolphins fan who happens to be a professional comedian. With no Dolphin royalty available to host Oscar was the perfect choice for the video and he did a fantastic job.

This video features interviews with former Dolphins Nat Moore & Joe Rose as well as Dolphins CEO Tom Garfinkel and Dolphins SVP of Communications & Community Affairs Jason Jenkins. Jason has actually been to every single #MetLifeTakeover and seems to really support what we are doing. There’s also an interview with Brian Miller who runs PhinPhanatic.com and did a series of stories about the #MetLifeTakeover. He also has been uploading virtual reality video to his new YouTube channel Phinatics360.

Also in the video is footage from our pre-party at Slattery’s Midtown Pub the night before and a performance from SoLo D. Every time I watch our video I get his song “Hit Squad” stuck in my head. I also need to give a shout out to DJ Tropic for DJing both parties and Sailor Jerry for sponsoring the tailgate.

Lastly, and probably most importantly I just wanted to thank everyone who came to the takeover, came to the tailgate, bought a raffle ticket, bought a t-shirt or just threw a couple dollar bills into a bucket at one of our weekly meet ups at Slattery’s. Because of you guys we have been able to donate $13,750 to charity this year and don’t think we are done giving. Just today we donated to Koa Misi’s CA wildfire fundraiser and we plan on doing more with Dolfans who live in Northern California.

We will have a full breakdown of everything we have donated at the end of the season but here’s an overview: We have donated $7000 to the Miami Dolphins Foundation, $2000 to the Dolphins Cycling Challenge, $1000 to RISE, $900 to cancer research charities, $2300 for various disaster relief efforts and several hundred dollars to our own members in need.

Okay, enough rambling. Let’s watch the 2017 #MetLifeTakeover video!

Ignoring everything that happened after 1pm, yesterday was a tremendous success. We had over 1000 Dolphins fans sit together, threw one hell of a tailgate and raised a TON of money for charity. I just wanted to quickly thank everyone who came out especially our volunteers and everyone who helped us get stuff on and off the busses. The day went very smoothly right up until the moment the game started.

Huge shout out to Urban Tailgate for their help with the party. We had a few tiny hiccups (the Jets wouldn’t lets us park our busses by the tailgate!) but overall it was amazing. We had some complaints about the cost before the tailgate but I didn’t hear a single complaint afterwards. I have a feeling we are not gonna have any trouble selling tickets next year.  This tailgate was fairly last minute and I can’t wait until next year because we are gonna up the game on everything. Next year should be epic.

Thanks to DJ Tropic for playing music and Solo D and DWA for playing a few songs and keeping the crowd going long after the performance.

Thanks to Joe Rose and the team at Cup Of Joe for taping their show live at our tailgate.  Nat Moore and Tom Garfinkel were guests on the show and hung out a bunch. Thanks to Jason Jenkins who helped put that together and has been at pretty much every Takeover. He’s a huge supporter of what we do. Jim Jenson came by the tailgate too just to hang out. That was pretty amazing. Thanks Crash!

And finally thanks to our liquor sponsor Sailor Jerry. They have sponsored the last few tailgates and we really appreciate the love. I think they actually have a bar at Hard Rock Stadium.

I am sure I am missing some people but we will thank them all in the wrap up video. We will also have an update of all the money we were able to donate to charity thanks to this weekend, but I should mention that the Cam Wake signed helmet raffle raised nearly $1800 alone for the Miami Dolphins Foundation and we donate $500 to Kiko Alonso’s hurricane fundraiser after the raffle we did at the party at Slattery’s Saturday night.

I gotta be honest and tell you that after the tailgate last year I was completely burnt out and ready to never do this again, but this year I am just sunburnt and ready to start planning the 2018 Takeover!

Phins up, Jets still suck, check out all the pictures below!

As every season draws to a close, fans across the country whip themselves up into a frenzy about the approaching offseason and what changes it will bring to their beloved franchises. Wild speculation about who they will acquire in free agency and who will be targeted in the draft fill team forums and heated debates ensue. But the offseason is a process, and although there is a new mock draft available just about every single day at this point, the draft order has more or less been determined. The beginning of this process? Deciding who we resign from our roster and who we let walk.

Until this phase of the offseason has taken place, predicting free agents and draft picks is mostly a pointless exercise…mostly.

The Dolphins are in a great position this year in terms of spending power. Jeff Ireland, a man in need of a Hallmark year, has an estimated $44 million in cap space to work with.

The front office decisions regarding who to retain and who to let go will be a massive determining factor in who is pursued in free agency and who makes the draft board in April.

Lets have a look at the most notable, shall we?

(more…)

The Colts snapped a 3-game winning streak. It was a game that was ultimately closely contested, so take heart, Dolphin fans. Despite the record setting day that Andrew Luck had, for his record passing yards by a rookie, the scoreline was a marginal 23-20 victory. The Colts’ strength lay in the fact that Luck is a quality signal caller. Throughout his Stanford career and the buildup to the draft, everyone knew that he had the goods to excel in the NFL, and that is why the Colts did not hesitate to pull the trigger on selecting him to replace one Peyton Manning. Luck was able to knock our secondary around for most of the game.

I do not think that will be the case with the Titans. Jake Locker (set to return this Sunday) is no Andrew Luck, furthermore he has not played now in over a month. Combine that with a team that just took an absolute drubbing to the Bears last week, and there is not a lot here to inspire much confidence among the Titans’ fan base. Through the first half of the season, this team has been lackluster to say the least; the offense has been feeble, and the defense virtually nonexistent. They rank dead last for points allowed, 30th for yards allowed, 27th in pass defense and 30th against the run.

(more…)