Where's there's smoke, there's Dolphins rumors.Barring unforeseen circumstances, Sean Payton will be at the Fox broadcast desk and Tom Brady will be in a Buccaneers uniform come the 2022 NFL season, but things could have been dramatically different had Miami had its way this offseason.Multiple reports over the last few months indicated that Miami's braintrust had something of a mad-scientist master plan that would have brought head coach Sean Payton and quarterback Tom Brady to South Beach, thus kickstarting a new era of Dolphins football after a middling Brian Flores tenure.MORE:Here's what what know about the rumors attaching the two football titans to Miami:, ProFootballTalk's Mike Florio reported that now-former Saints coach Sean Payton was supposedly a target of the Dolphins to fill their head coaching vacancy. Miami had surprisingly fired Brian Flores after his third season at the helm.The deal to bring Payton aboard, though, never came to fruition for a number of reasons:One may have been Payton's insistence on stepping away from the gameAnother may have been Flores' racial discrimination lawsuit against the Dolphins and the NFL, with the league striking down any deal in the worksAnother may have been the potential minimal compensation return from Miami in any deal involving PaytonPayton later weighed in on the rumors connecting him to the Dolphins, saying that he had "no clue" about the rumor attaching him and Tom Brady as a package deal in Miami.I have no clue about the Tampa Bay-Miami Dolphin-Tom Brady rumor. My understanding is, there was a request put in where the intermediaries talked. I'm like the rest of you, I heard that story. I wasn't coaching. I told you guys that already. If I had been ready to coach, like this year, I would have stayed in New Orleans. It's nice to have someone interested, and that's about it. Our focus on Tom Brady has been about beating him, not joining him.The coach would later Gio Gonzalez Jersey land a gig with Fox as a studio replacement for Jimmy Johnson during pre- and post-game coverage. But it wouldn't be the last of the rumors about a potential return to the sideline.According to the , the Dolphins were prepared to put the "pay" in "Payton:" The Dolphins reportedly had a five-year, $100 million contract offer at the ready for Payton. Simple math indicates that would have been worth a whopping $20 million per season.Safe to say, Fox probably got him at a pretty reduced rate.Payton, though, was only half of a potential package deal for a Miami reboot.Tom Brady enjoyed a brief retirement this offseason, but rumors connected him to both the 49ers and the Dolphins earlier this year. Brady, though, is scheduled to take snaps for the Buccaneers come Week 1 of the 2022 season.MORE:But before he announced he was coming back to Tampa Bay, Brady was a key cog in Miami's master plan: Reports indicated that, in 2020, Dolphins owner Stephen Ro s wanted to connect a free agent Brady and then-head coach Brian Flores in an attempt to bring the quarterback to Miami. Ultimately, Brady turned down Miami's overtures.That wasn't the end of Ro s' dream to bring TB12 to South Beach, however. that Miami's pursuit of Brady also included a minority ownership stake in the team. The deal, though, would fall through in the wake of the furor around Flores' ouster.Any such deal to bring Brady to Miami would have involved a trade between the two Florida teams something that then-head coachBruce Arians said would be "bad busine s."MORE:Brady, though, wouldn't dispel any notions that he was connected to Miami, instead opting to dance around questions surrounding Miami's courtship of him in June."I had a lot of conversations with a lot of people," Brady said, But, at the end of the day, Brady is in the Bay, Payton is at the desk and the NFL remains largely unchanged. Oh, but what could have been. Patrick Corbin Jersey