Dolphins tight end Darren Waller will be out for at least four weeks.
Waller has been placed on injured reserve after suffering a pectoral injury during Sunday’s loss to the Browns.
After coming out of retirement over the summer to play for Miami, Waller has caught 10 passes for 117 yards with four touchdowns.
As a corresponding move, the Dolphins have signed Greg Dulcich to the 53-man roster from the team’s practice squad. A third-round pick in 2022, Dulcich caught 33 passes for 411 yards with two touchdowns for the Broncos as a rookie. But he played only two games in 2023 due to injury. He was subsequently waived from the team midway through the 2024 season.
The Giants claimed him off waivers, and he appeared in five games for the club. They waived him at the start of the 2025 regular season, and he signed with Miami’s practice squad.
Miami also signed tight end Chris Myarick to the team’s practice squad. He previously spent time with the Dolphins from 2019-2020.
Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa has thrown six interceptions in the last two weeks and he’s leading the league with 10 interceptions, but head coach Mike McDaniel says he isn’t wavering in his belief that the quarterback is the right person for the job.
McDaniel said on Monday that Tagovailoa will start against the Falcons in Week 8 and offered another vote of confidence during his Wednesday press conference. McDaniel was asked how things stand between him and the quarterback, and he said that they had a pair of “great” meetings the last two days to go over what’s gone wrong on offense.
“As Tua and I have always operated, I think there’s zero uncertainty with Tua on my conviction in him and my belief in him,” McDaniel said. “I think we’re both very, very eager to do better at our jobs and we’re both very committed and trusting in each other to respond to what is necessary for the team to do better.”
There’s little outside confidence that McDaniel and Tagovailoa are going to come up with ways to significantly change their results in their fourth year together, but there’s also little reason to think that going to Quinn Ewers or Zach Wilson is going do that. That may leave the two men together at the helm of a sinking ship and it appears that McDaniel is content to go down together.
Veteran pass rusher Shaquil Barrett, a two-time Super Bowl winner and two-time Pro Bowler, vowed through his agent to play in 2025.
Barrett received a midseason tryout on Tuesday with the Colts.
Undrafted in 2014, Barrett was a member of the Super Bowl 50 championship team in Denver. After five seasons with the Broncos, he signed with the Buccaneers. The 32-year-old Barrett won a second ring with the 2020 Bucs.
Following five total seasons in Tampa, Barrett signed as a free agent with the Dolphins in March 2024. He retired in July. By November, he wanted to return. The Dolphins (after declined to activate him or to release him from the reserve-retired list) eventually waived him. After clearing waivers, Barrett returned to the Buccaneers. He appeared in one regular-season game and the playoff loss to the Commanders.
In Indy, Barrett participated in a tryout with several other defensive players, including defensive end Seth Coleman. The Colts signed Coleman, an undrafted free agent in 2025 who spent the offseason and training camp with Seattle, to the practice squad.
For now Barrett is available. And he seems to remain very interested in an eleventh NFL season.
He has 59 career sacks. His best season came in 2019, when he racked up a league-high 19.5 sacks with the Buccaneers.
Through the first six games of the season, Zach Wilson served as the understudy to Dolphins starting quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. That changed on Sunday, with Quinn Ewers getting the QB2 designation.
After the game, coach Mike McDaniel explained the move as matchup-driven. By Monday, it sounded as if he’s revisiting the decision to make Wilson the backup and Ewers the emergency option.
“I make a very calculated intentional effort to observe each player every week,” McDaniel told reporters. “I think again last week based upon the game plan, the situation and Quinn more than anything, it kind of created an opportunity where I thought with conviction and I think the coaching staff agreed that Quinn in this particular game gave us the best shot if he had to come in.”
Ewers eventually replaced Tagovailoa, once the game was out of hand.
“Moving forward, I’m hoping it’s not a week-to-week thing,” McDaniel said of his quarterback depth chart. “It will be competitive this week and at the end of the week, I’ll let you guys know who the backup is in the hopes that somebody grabs and takes. I think you have to be willing to do whatever it takes that’s the best thing for your team. I was very proud of Zach understanding that this was not a wholesale change, this was for this game and all things are on the table moving forward in their competition. We’ll settle that on the field and move on from there.”
With McDaniel saying on Sunday that “everything is on the table” regarding Tagovailoa, who is now tied for the league lead with Raider quarterback Geno Smith in interceptions at 10, the new backup could eventually be the new starter.
Here’s the reality. In a lost season, there will be a point at which it makes sense to evaluate Ewers. Especially if the Dolphins’ next regime won’t be inclined to keep Tagovailoa on the field. Ewers, a seventh-round draft pick, is under contract through 2028 at a total payout of $4.33 million. Which is nearly $50 million less than Tua’s guaranteed compensation for 2026.
That’s where the line can become blurred between coaching decisions and organizational priorities. If ownership at some point wants to see what Ewers can do, nothing the coaching staff thinks will matter.
Bill Belichick’s first season as a collegiate head coach has been a disaster, but Tuesday brought a reminder that his time in the NFL was much more successful.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame announced that Belichick is one of 12 coaches that their blue-ribbon committee has advanced to the next stage of the selections process. That group will be whittled to nine in the near future and a finalist from that group will be selected in mid-November. That finalist will then be voted on by the Hall of Fame selection committee.
Belichick is joined by four other Super Bowl-winning head coaches in Tom Coughlin, Mike Holmgren, George Seifert, and Mike Shanahan. Buddy Parker also coached the Lions to two NFL titles in the pre-Super Bowl era.
The other coaches to advance in the process are Bill Arnsparger, Alex Gibbs, Chuck Knox, Dan Reeves, Marty Schottenheimer, and Clark Shaughnessy.
