Thursday, May 08, 2008 | Posted by Joe Mayes

Much has been said regarding the sweeping personnel changes made by executive vice president of football operations Bill Parcells, general manager Jeff Ireland, and head coach Tony Sparano in their first five months in Miami. The purge began in early February with the release of 10 players, including longtime fan favorite Zach Thomas. Since then, the team's new brain trust has been recreating the roster in its own image.

The Dolphins' front office has been active in cutting loose those who don’t fit into Miami’s future plans and bringing in “Parcells guys,” players who have played for el Atún Grande or who seem suited to the team's new style of play.

With the draft completed and the first rookie minicamp in the books, the Dolphins presently have 83 players on the roster. While it is too soon to tell how many of those guys will actually make it to training camp, a look at the composition of the roster may shed some light on exactly how thorough the spring cleaning has been.

Of the 83 players, 44 (53 percent) were brought in this year either through trades, free agency or the draft. Last spring, then-GM Randy Mueller and head coach Cam Cameron did much the same, clearing out the players brought in during Nick Saban’s time with Mueller before parsing the roster down to 86 players going into last season’s July training camp.

The similarities between the Mueller/Cameron roster and the one built by the Parcells regime don’t end there. Of the current batch of 83 Dolphins, only four -- Jason Ferguson (12), Vonnie Holliday (11), Jason Taylor (12), and Joey Porter (10) -- have 10 or more years in the league and 23 have five-plus years' experience.

Last year’s group of 86 had seven players with 10 or more years and 23 in the five-plus group. Additionally, both rosters were made up of 30 percent rookies, with 25 on this year’s version and 26 in 2007.

Last year’s two Super Bowl teams, the Patriots and the Giants, have 80 and 83 players, respectively, on their current rosters. While the number of players with 10 or more years' experience (nine for New England and eight on the Giants) and five or more years (34 and 25) are not dramatically different than the Dolphins, the big difference is in the numbers of rookies each team currently has on the squad.

While 30 percent of the Dolphins’ roster were/are rookies, the Patriots and Giants have just 19 (24 percent) and 17 (21 percent), respectively. Moreover, while more than half of the current Dolphins were brought in since the start of 2008, New England has just 29 (36 percent) new Patriots on its roster this year.

These numbers quantify what is already a widely accepted fact: The new front office came to Miami and cleaned house. However, they also show that what Parcells has done isn’t very different than what Mueller and Cameron accomplished last year. In 2007 and again this year, the plan seems to be the same -- get rid of the previous regime’s trash and retool.

There’s an old expression that says, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The Dolphins have a recent history of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, discarding productive players who then go on to succeed elsewhere (Wes Welker and Chris Chambers come to mind). As the Dolphins continue to search for diamonds in the rough to turn last year’s 1-15 squad around, fans can only hope that their team's restructured front office does a better job of distinguishing between trash and treasure than the prior ones did.

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