With the decision to trade DE Charles Harris, the Miami Dolphins have opened up the door to an alternative method to pooling late round NFL Draft picks for next year’s 2021 draft. Considering the Dolphins will not be eligible for compensatory picks due to their spending in 2020, the team is going to have to get more resourceful in order to manufacture extra NFL Draft selections on top of the ten selections they’re already scheduled for, including two in each of the first two rounds.
The trade of Harris is a good start. The Dolphins were able to take a player who was almost assuredly not going to make the team and flip him into a 7th-round draft selection, which Miami could use as a piece to trade up in the draft, flip for a veteran at a discount or use as a lottery ticket and make a selection in the draft with.
Who else might be sensible trade candidate for the Dolphins as they look to stockpile picks for next year’s NFL Draft? Here are three sensible candidates who could be moved.
OT Julien Davenport
Davenport came over to the Dolphins courtesy of the Laremy Tunsil deal — he was effectively a “throw in” player to help the Dolphins swallow the prospect of dealing away their left tackle and not having a feasible player to step in behind him. But Davenport is also a 25-year old offensive tackle with plenty of physical tools. He entered the league with the knowledge of needing time and patience to develop and, with a $2.13M salary, he’s fairly cheap.
Davenport might become expendable if Austin Jackson wrangles the starting tackle job from the jump — although his expendability may hinge on the competency of OGs Solomon Kindley and Michael Deiter, too. If they perform well enough to push veteran OL Jesse Davis from the starting line up so he can serve as a utility blocker and as the swing tackle, Davenport may be worth flipping for a late pick to a tackle hungry team.
RB Kalen Ballage
Consider Ballage in the same boat as Harris. He’s as good as gone based on the Dolphins’ roster decisions. But is there a team out there that liked Ballage in the pre-draft process who would be willing to take a late flyer on him? If that’s the case, the Dolphins shouldn’t think twice. Between the new bodies in Jordan Howard, Matt Breida and Malcolm Perry — plus Ballage being third on the returning RB pecking order behind Patrick Laird and Myles Gaskin — this transaction is a no brainer if they get a suitor.
QB Josh Rosen
Yes, it is that time of year again for Josh Rosen. For the second consecutive year, the former top-10 overall pick has seen his team draft a quarterback in the top-5 of the NFL Draft. It’s an unfortunate set of circumstances for Rosen, whose NFL career has been anything but stable thus far. The Dolphins rolled the dice on him in 2019, hoping to skip the line in needing to draft a quarterback by picking him up at a discount. It didn’t work.
The challenge for Miami now is that when you consider his youth, cost, positional value, the investment Miami made to acquire him, the age of starter Ryan Fitzpatrick and the durability questions with new quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, Rosen is probably worth more to the Dolphins as a cheap developmental backup who may see his stock rebound with some long-term investment and coaching than he’d be worth in a trade. The Dolphins would need to get close to their initial investment to move Rosen and with veteran quarterbacks Andy Dalton and Cam Newton on the free agent market, it is hard to imagine a team will pony up draft picks to acquire the unknown when there are far superior quarterbacks on the open market.