If you look at the league-wide spending at each position on the football team, odds are you’re going to find the Miami Dolphins near the bottom of the list at just about every position. That’s the beauty and nature of a teardown — you get to start from scratch. And that is, indeed, exactly what the Dolphins have intended all along.
They’ll get their fresh start, but now the question becomes “where do they go from here?”. The team will have a three to five year window once they commit to a rookie quarterback to maintain higher spending around him — and then a second contract for a deserving starting quarterback will force the Dolphins to pivot their cap and payroll allocation.
But that’s on the horizon. In the here and now, the Miami Dolphins rank inside the top-10 in cash commitments across the NFL in only 2 position groups:
- Wide receiver ($24.6M, 9th in the NFL)
- Defensive backs ($45.5M, 3rd in the NFL)
If the defensive backs number seems shocking, remember that Miami still has Reshad Jones and his $15.6M cap against the books for 2020. By cutting Jones, Miami would move outside the top-10 at this position group in spending.
Are that should be the unfortunate expectation for how Jones’ tenure ends in South Florida. The team is going to implement a ton of defensive backs in the future, but even before Jones was on the IR he wasn’t used at an especially high rate. Which leaves the Miami Dolphins as a fringe top spender at wide receiver and nothing else. With contract extensions already handed out to DeVante Parker, Jakeem Grant and Allen Hurns, Miami is fairly stable here. But even receiver isn’t above a drop off should the team choose to cut WR Albert Wilson, who accounts for nearly half of Miami’s 2020 cap commitments at wide receiver.
Flexibility is the name of the game for the Dolphins now — they can shape this roster in any way that they’d like.
[vertical-gallery id=422254]