After wild 2019 roster upheaval, quiet Miami Dolphins seem comfortable with ’20 squad
We won’t know for certain that the Miami Dolphins are an improved football team this year for a few weeks.
But make no mistake: They think they’re a much better team than they were a year ago.
That’s the unmistakable message Chris Grier and Brian Flores sent Sunday by not claiming a single player who was cut Saturday by the league’s 31 other teams. (And it wasn’t from lack of opportunity; just two players who didn’t go to camp with Miami were claimed before the Dolphins’ waiver turn came up: offensive tackle Jackson Barton and wide receiver Damion Ratley.)
By way of comparison, Grier and Flores changed a full 10 percent of the Dolphins’ roster the Sunday before the season opener in 2019.
So expect a far better Week 1 product than the team managed last year. Wholesale late roster changes resulted in an unprepared team against the Ravens, who smashed Miami by seven touchdowns in the opener.
The team’s inactivity also suggests the Dolphins’ brain trust is comfortable with the team’s depth on the offensive and defensive lines. The Dolphins have just three natural defensive ends (Shaq Lawson, Emmanuel Ogbah and Jason Strowbridge) and just three pure guards (Ereck Flowers, Solomon Kindley and backup center Michael Deiter), with offensive tackle Rob Hunt competing at guard for the Dolphins.
Meanwhile, they have seven wide receivers (including newcomer Lynn Bowden) on their 53-man roster — and that was still not enough. On Sunday, the Dolphins brought back Arkansas State undrafted rookies Kirk Merritt and Matt Cole, who were waived on Saturday, and added controversial ex-Browns receiver Antonio Callaway, signing both players to their practice squad.
Callaway must serve a seven-game suspension to start the year for repeatedly violating the league’s substance abuse policy. He is allowed to attend meetings and rehab his knee injury during that suspension.
Callaway’s agent, South Florida-based Malki Kawa, told the Miami Herald and NFL Network this of Callaway, who attended Miami’s Booker T. Washington High School: “I’m so proud of the work Antonio has done in the last several months to put himself in this position with a second chance with his hometown team.”
Callaway appeared in a combined 20 games and started 13 for the Browns in 2018 and 2019, catching 51 passes for 675 yards and five touchdowns.
Callaway and Bowden, whom the Dolphins acquired from the Raiders on Saturday in a low-risk trade, join the team with tantalizing potential but more than a few red flags.
Las Vegas basically gave Bowden away to Miami just four months after drafting him in the third round — an almost unheard of concession of mistake.
But with the Raiders, Bowden never really fit in on the field, and apparently off it as well. He preferred to play wide receiver. They stuck him at running back, and as a result never flashed and reportedly struggled in pass protection.
That was only part of the issue, however, according to a report Saturday by The Athletic’s Vic Tafur.
Citing unnamed sources, Tafur wrote that some Raiders officials believed that Bowden “was more concerned with picking up new cars than the playbook ... [and] there were also some growing concerns that he was getting more and more distracted in Las Vegas.”
Bowden must have gotten word of that criticism, because he responded indirectly on Twitter Sunday.
“Don’t believe everything you read [lol emoji]. I stepped outside of my home twice if that on to a new journey [let’s rock emoji].”
The Dolphins like Bowden’s upside at receiver. In 2018, he caught 67 passes for 745 yards and five touchdowns. He started Kentucky’s final eight games at quarterback last season but finished the year with 30 catches for 348 yards.
▪ Two days after the Dolphins cut him, Josh Rosen went unclaimed and then signed with Tampa Bay’s practice squad.
The Dolphins have decided on a third quarterback to replace him: Jake Rudock, according to a league source. He’s joining the team’s practice squad for the second straight season. Rudock’s regular-season NFL stats: three completions in five attempts for 24 yards, for Detroit in 2017.
Besides Rudock and the three aforementioned receivers, the other 2020 Dolphins practice squaders, according to sources, are cornerbacks Tae Hayes, Ken Webster and Javaris Davis; rookie defensive ends Nick Coe and Tyshun Render; rookie defensive tackle Benito Jones; rookie running back Salvon Ahmed; safeties Brian Cole and Nate Holley; rookie linebacker Kylan Johnson; rookie offensive tackle Jonathan Hubbard; tight end Chris Myarick and guard Durval Queiroz-Neto, who’s a former defensive lineman.
The Dolphins get a special exemption to keep Queiroz-Neto on the practice squad; other teams can carry only 16 on the practice squad.
Of that group, only Coe (the undrafted rookie from Auburn) and Cole (the Vikings’ seventh-rounder from Mississippi State) were not with the Dolphins for any of the past five weeks.
As for Rosen, the Dolphins are one the hook for the remainder of his guaranteed money and must swallow a $4.9 million cap hit, according to Overthecap.com. His 2020 cap hit would have been $2.2 million if he had remained on the team.
This story was originally published September 6, 2020 at 1:29 PM.
