MIAMI GARDENS — To anyone who questioned whether Mike McDaniel was serious when he vowed he’d pay more attention to running on Sundays, you have your answer.

McDaniel vs. that NBC cameraman was no contest.

McDaniel vs. Bill Belichick was a contest. Same result, though.

In case you didn’t see it, McDaniel had just finished his halftime interview with NBC's Melissa Stark when he noticed he was being pursued by the cameraman, so he decided to have a little fun, breaking into a sprint and leaving not only the cameraman in his wake, but also team security head Drew Brooks.

“He probably touched, I would say, 17.8 (mph),” fullback Alec Ingold joked Monday. “He would’ve hit the 18s if he didn’t put his head back.”

Flirting with getting nabbed for taunting, McDaniel did peek over his shoulder to make sure he’d won his footrace.

Call it a metaphor for the more important contest of the evening, one that enabled the Dolphins to walk away from their opening two games, both on the road, at 2-0, setting them up nicely for Sunday’s home-opener against winless Denver.

Sunday night’s 24-17 victory over the New England Patriots was an example of what happens when pro football becomes a chess match. Having studied Miami’s 36-34 opening victory over the Los Angeles Chargers, Patriots coach Bill Belichick decided there was no way Tua Tagovailoa and Jaylen Waddle and especially Tyreek Hill were going to beat him. Among other things, Belichick threw three high safeties at the Dolphins. No one was going to get behind his defense.

In the process, Belichick was daring the Dolphins to beat him on the ground. When they started doing it with outside runs, he dared them to go inside.

Fine, except with every move, McDaniel was one step ahead. By the end, the Dolphins had passed 30 times and run 30 times, symmetry at its finest. Instead of 466 yards through the air as the Dolphins had in Week 1, this time they had 145 on the ground, averaging 4.8 per rush, led by Raheem Mostert carrying 18 times for 121 yards, a 6.8 average and two touchdowns, including a 43-yarder.

Maybe, if we were talking rookie coach Mike McDaniel, he would have told himself he doesn’t have Jonathan Taylor or Dalvin Cook or, for that matter, injured Jeff Wilson, so why not put all his chips on Tagovailoa’s left arm? One reason Belichick has those 329 wins is because more than a few teams were that stubborn. Even Peyton Manning banged his head against the wall before he caught on.

“By and large, most teams — specifically coached by coach Belichick — if you’ve put on tape that you can win a certain way, they’ll try to force you to win another way,” McDaniel said. “So I don’t go into the game assuming. We go into the game kind of prepared if they are overplaying something, we have to have answers.”

Mike McDaniel knew Bill Belichick was cooking up something

McDaniel’s title, after all, is head coach, emphasis on “head.” Here’s what was swirling around his head in the lead-up to this game:

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“You don’t know exactly what it is, but you can assume that with all the unbelievable football that he’s produced, that coach Belichick and his staff would come up with something that we hadn’t seen and we’d have to be able to adjust,” McDaniel said. “So I knew line of scrimmage play was going to be important, but you have to let the game kind of play out, see what the defense is doing and if they’re taking something away, something else is vulnerable. So you just kind of have to have equity in your game plan from that perspective.”

What McDaniel had at his disposal is not equitable in the eyes of 31 other teams. Of the three fastest ballcarriers this season as measured in miles per hour by the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, all were recorded by Dolphins. Two were by Hill in Week 1, but No. 2 on the list was Mostert, who hit 21.62 on his 43-yarder, his third rushing TD of the season to share the NFL lead.

In case you’re wondering, Waddle is ninth at 20.99 mph, and we’ve yet to see rookie running back De’Von Achane show the speed that made him an All-American on the track at Texas A&M. Put that together and you have burners out wide and in the backfield.

McDaniel: Dolphins' goals ‘much bigger' than 2-0 start

Last year, McDaniel ran the ball only 38.6 percent of the time. When he talks about lessons learned from the roller coaster that was last year’s 9-8, he’s talking players and coaches.

“Listen, we have some residual scars from last season that you kind of make last season purposeful,” McDaniel said. “It was the first time that a lot of guys had felt some sort of positive hype. Whether it’s correlation or causation, the league humbled them, I think, and us. I think that’s very still alive and awake in our mind. It’s so early in the season. Again, two wins in two games is whatever. Our goals are much, much bigger than that.”

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Ingold is a 232-pound fullback who has convinced himself he “loves” taking on defensive linemen who have nearly a hundred pounds on him. So he’s not afraid to look at the big picture and how the running game has an essential place in it. He pointed to the New England game.

“I think that just kind of is a sneak peek and what the rest of the season is going to be,” Ingold said. “We're going to have to win a lot of games a lot of different ways — good weather, bad weather, road games, home games, whatever that is … if we know that we’re going to be in the games that we want to be in.”

There’s no mistaking what he meant by that.

“I think you have to keep a real perspective on what are we trying to do?” McDaniel said. “Are we just trying to get a win? Or are we trying to build to something special?"

Dolphins reporter Hal Habib can be reached at  hhabib@pbpost.com. Follow him on social media @gunnerhal.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Dolphins' Mike McDaniel staying step ahead of Patriots' Bill Belichick huge