"The Dolphins cut placekicker Jay Feely on Tuesday like a guillotine cuts off a head, and for any who still doubted it, this should have proved it for sure:

There is nothing touchy-feely about the people now running the Dolphins.

A pragmatic ruthlessness permeates the way football boss Bill Parcells and coach Tony Sparano operate, and it is about time. It is about a decade overdue.

Healthy fear runs through the team like electricity, chasing away the last remnants of leftover complacency, of softness. Any player feeling any sense of entitlement has met an enemy he cannot beat in a demanding new regime that brings precisely the massive teardown and buildup -- the slap in the face -- a 1-15 team required.

Don Shula was the granite-jawed autocrat down here, the antithesis of a ''player's coach.'' He had that one chair in his office, where players called in for discipline had to sit. There hasn't been a more feared seat this side of Old Sparky.

Jimmy Johnson came next, every bit as much a ruling monarch. JJ's iron fist was legend. All you had to do was tell the story of the rookie Cowboys lineman who fell asleep in a meeting and was awakened and cut on the spot in front of the entire team.

Shula and Johnson left with the 1990s, and if you want to know why it has been a downward spiral for this franchise since the start of this decade, just look at the coaches who have followed in their place.

Players made fun of nice-guy Dave Wannstedt behind his back, with his dime-store psychology, the lobster traps hanging from ceiling the week of a ''trap'' game.

Nick Saban came in with his Napoleon complex, seeming tough but learning what worked with the college kids didn't translate in the pros.

Cam Cameron arrived next and was the one-year nightmare, losing the locker room and utterly disrespected, as when Joey Porter defied a specific order to return directly after a game at Pittsburgh and an emasculated Cameron did nothing about it.

NEW CULTURE

Miami hasn't had a man with the vision or spine to be an NFL coach since Shula and Johnson, but seems to have that leadership again in the tandem of the no-nonsense Parcells and his coach/consiglierie in the blunt-spoken Sparano.

The coach has talked of changing the ''culture'' here. That starts with the players knowing who is boss. Knowing that someone is.

So the new regime lopped Feely off the roster and the man just cut was bleeding in the media Tuesday about how he had been treated unfairly because of a perceived personality conflict with Parcells.

That idea that Parcells would place ego above team in eradicating a player not perceived as a ''Parcells guy'' might be easier to swallow if the Tuna's golden child this training camp and preseason wasn't a former pot-smoking and often-suspended Ricky Williams -- who has taken advantage of the clean slate given.

Feely's conspiracy theory is nonsense, and Sparano pretty much said