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Whenever a season doesn’t go well and a coaching staff gets replaced, the new staff always talks about how aggressive they’ll be.

That seems to be the case in Miami, as safety Michael Thomas said during a webcast with 120 Sports that the 2015 coaching staff “handcuffed” players, and that new defensive coordinator Vance Joseph as promised they’ll be “not so vanilla.”

Via Adam Beasley of the Miami Herald, Thomas said Dolphins defenders “were limited to how many plays we could call, what type of plays we could call.”

Of course, that might make it a little awkward for Thomas, since last year’s interim defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo is back as secondary coach this year. But the Dolphins were really bad at defense last year, finishing 25th in yards allowed.

They also didn’t get much impact from expensive free agent Ndamukong Suh.

“He wasn’t put in position to make plays, like a lot of us,” Thomas said. “I wasn’t put in position to make plays because of injuries, I had to play out of position. We were very vanilla last year. It wasn’t all our defensive coaches. We had to work with what we had. It was very vanilla. Other teams knew it was very vanilla. . . .

“This is going to be an entirely different product you see on the field this year.”

Of course, that gets promised everywhere there’s a coaching change, and it won’t take much to improve on what we saw from the Dolphins and Suh last season.