The Dolphins are not expected to use the franchise tag on safety Jevón Holland, Cameron Wolfe of NFLMedia reports. That would allow Wolfe to hit free agency as the top player at his position.
The franchise tag at Holland’s position is expected to be $19.6 million and the transition tag $15.6 million.
After the Dolphins didn’t extend Holland’s contract before the 2024 season, when he made $3.37 million, it was expected he would hit free agency in 2025.
The Dolphins’ other starting safety, Jordan Poyer, also is scheduled to become a free agent.
The Jaguars could have interest in Holland with defensive coordinator Anthony Campanile having been on staff in Miami for three seasons with Holland.
Holland, a second-round pick in 2021, has totaled 301 tackles, five interceptions, 25 pass breakups, five forced fumbles and five sacks in his career.
How strong is the word “Olympics”? Strong enough to make millions pay attention to sports that, for the ensuing three years and 50 weeks, they don’t care about.
Sprinter Noah Lyles hopes to change that. And the 2024 gold medalist plans to start the process by racing Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill.
“Something that’s constantly on my mind is how to keep track relevant,” Lyles told NBC News. “Track and field has a great reputation inside of the Olympics, but in the marketing sense, when it comes to the U.S., it’s just fallen short a few too many times.”
Lyles also has a selfish motivation, in light of the lack of enduring and widespread fame that comes from winning gold and becoming regarded as the fastest man on the planet.
“I want to be more than just a runner because there’s enough runners,” Lyles said. “But who’s the performers?”
So one way to perform, in Lyles’s mind, would be to race — and beat — someone far more famous who plays the most popular sport in America.
“I’m not here to play around,” Lyles said. “I’m dead serious about this. I’m going to bring everything I got for this.”
He’s willing to take the heat for the perception that he’s lowering himself to race someone who isn’t a world-class sprinter.
“I get a lot of hate from people who don’t believe that I should be racing him,” Lyles said. “And they’re like, ‘This is beneath you.’ Well, apparently it’s not, because here we are.”
Some would say that, in reality, it’s beneath Hill.
Although the details about Tyreek vs. Noah (or Noah vs. Tyreek) haven’t been announced (including, you know, distance), Lyles’s effort to hype the TBD footrace includes boasting that he plans to set a new world record.
“I’m more thinking about, ‘Dang, I have an opportunity to break the world record along with beating Tyreek’,” Lyles said. “So Tyreek better be ready, because if a world record gets dropped on his head, he ain’t gonna be able to hear nothing.”
Whether that’s enough to get people fully invested in the race remains to be seen. Maybe they should stage an argument on Bourbon Street, too.
Recent days have seen the opening of an 11-year old time capsule. Which is fine. As long as its full contents are given fair consideration.
In an article that landed last week on ESPN.com, former Dolphins tackle Jonathan Martin said of the 2013 scandal that took the league by storm, “I never believed for a second I was being bullied. . . . It’s a story that I’ve been trying to fix for 10 years.”
The man at the center of the harassment Martin experienced, Richie Incognito, has responded to the comment by, frankly, bullying media members on the cesspool known as X to apologize for the whole thing. It has prompted a small army of social media justice warriors to insist that Richie get his full and complete redemption, preferably through litigation.
But there’s much more to the story. There are, you know, facts. Those stubborn things that tend to disrupt narratives, unless they can be properly excluded from the algorhythmic echo chamber that feeds on the transmogrification of opinion into truth.
Let’s start with the thing that led to widespread reporting about the things Incognito (and others) said and did to Martin (and others). The Ted Wells report. All 140 pages of it. Before anyone can take Martin’s recent comments and twist them into the full and complete exoneration that Incognito currently demands, the report should be read.
Or at least skimmed. You’ll get the gist.
But if consumption of content at 280 characters has impaired your willingness or ability to digest 140 pages, just read the first five. That’s the introduction to what follows.
Here’s some of it.
- “On Monday, October 28, 2013, midway through the season, Martin abruptly walked out of the Dolphins’ practice facility and checked himself into a nearby hospital, requesting psychological treatment.”
- “After a thorough examination of the facts, we conclude that three starters on the Dolphins offensive line, Richie Incognito, John Jerry and Mike Pouncey, engaged in a pattern of harassment directed at not only Martin, but also another young Dolphins offensive lineman, whom we refer to as Player A for confidentiality reasons, and a member of the training staff, whom we refer to as the Assistant Trainer.”
- “Martin was taunted on a persistent basis with sexually explicit remarks about his sister and his mother and at times ridiculed with racial insults and other offensive comments.”
- “In 2013, the Dolphins distributed a workplace conduct policy to all players, and Incognito, Jerry and Pouncey each signed an acknowledgement form stating that he understood the policy and agreed to be bound by it. The policy defines harassment to include ‘unwelcome contact; jokes, comments and antics; generalizations and put-downs.’ Guided by this policy, it was not difficult to conclude that the Assistant Trainer and Player A were harassed, but the questions raised in Martin’s case were more complex, nuanced and difficult.”
- “As an initial matter, Martin developed an odd but seemingly close friendship with Incognito. Not only did both linemen report that they enjoyed socializing together, the evidence also shows that they often communicated in a vulgar manner. Incognito contends that the conduct about which Martin complains was part of locker room banter meant in good fun and that Martin was a willing and active participant in verbal sparring, never letting on that he was hurt by it. Martin claims that at times he participated in off-color joking with Incognito and others in an attempt to fit in, with the hope of reducing the treatment he found offensive. According to our consulting expert, a psychologist who focuses on matters of workplace conduct, such a reaction is consistent with the behavior of a victim of abusive treatment.”
- "[W]e ultimately concluded that Martin was indeed harassed by Incognito, who can fairly be described as the main instigator, and by Jerry and Pouncey, who tended to follow Incognito’s lead.”
- "[S]hortly after Martin left the team, Incognito made a number of telling entries in a notebook used to keep track of ‘fines’ the offensive linemen imposed on each other in their ‘kangaroo court’ (typically for trivial infractions such as arriving late to meetings). Incognito recorded a $200 fine against himself for ‘breaking Jmart,’ awarded another lineman who had been verbally taunted a $250 bonus for ‘not cracking first,’ and wrote down a number of penalties against Martin for acting like a ‘pussy.’”
- “The evidence shows, and Incognito did not dispute, that ‘breaking Jmart’ meant causing Martin to have an emotional reaction in response to taunting.”
- “Approximately one week after Martin left the team, on November 3, 2013, Incognito wrote nearly identical text messages to Pouncey and another lineman ‘They’re going to suspend me. Please destroy the fine book first thing in the morning.’” (Emphasis added.)
- “We view Incognito’s entries in the fine book about ‘breaking Jmart’ and his attempt to destroy the fine book — which was unsuccessful — as evidence demonstrating his awareness that he had engaged in improper conduct toward Martin.”
- “We reject the assertion by Incognito that Martin has fabricated claims of harassment after the fact. Contemporaneous text messages that Martin sent to his parents and others months before he left the Dolphins — which have never before been made public — corroborate Martin’s account that he was distressed by insults from his teammates and experiencing emotional turmoil because he believed he was a ‘push over’ who was unable to stop the verbal assaults.”
- “Further, Martin’s vulnerabilities do not excuse the harassment that was directed at him. That the same taunts might have bounced off a different person is beside the point. Bullies often pick vulnerable victims, but this makes their conduct more, not less, objectionable.”
- “The evidence establishes that persistent harassment by Incognito, Jerry and Pouncey contributed to Martin’s decision to leave the team. The facts we uncovered do not support the view of Incognito and his teammates that this conduct was all good-natured fun among friends. Nevertheless, although Incognito, Jerry and Pouncey verbally harassed Martin, we find that they did not intend to drive Martin from the team or cause him lasting emotional injury.”
- “In short, the treatment of Martin and others in the Miami Dolphins organization at times was offensive and unacceptable in any environment, including the world professional football players inhabit. A young football player who has the skills to play at the highest level, and who also happens to be quiet and reserved, should have the opportunity to pursue a career in the NFL without being subjected to harassment from his teammates.”
Beyond the introduction, take a peek at the comments made about Martin’s sister (pages 9-10), the unedited text of the voice message that Martin’s father still has to this day (pages 10-11), the text messages Martin exchanged with his parents as he tried to handle the harassment (pages 13-14), the harassment directed to the Assistant Trainer (page 22), and the physical harassment to which Martin was subjected (pages 85-88).
Then there’s this, from page 12: “For the most part, Incognito does not dispute saying or writing any of the statements that Martin claimed offended him. Further, Incognito admitted that at times the very purpose of the verbal taunts was to ‘get under the skin’ of another person. From Incognito’s perspective, however, the statements in question were an accepted part of the everyday camaraderie of the Dolphins tight-knit offensive line. Incognito told us that Martin (and other offensive linemen) all recognized, accepted and, indeed, actively participated in ‘go-for-the-jugular’ teasing, and that vulgarity and graphic sexual comments were not only a staple of their locker-room culture but also helped them bond.” (Emphasis added.)
Martin’s comment — 11 years later — that he never believed he was “bullied” doesn’t erase any of the content from the Wells report. And to the extent Incognito takes issue with any, some, or all of it, he has had more than 11 years to correct the record.
In a statement issued to PFT on the same day the Wells report was released, Incognito’s lawyer, Mark Schamel, said this: “Mr. Wells’ NFL report is replete with errors. . . . It is disappointing that Mr. Wells would have gotten it so wrong, but not surprising. The truth, as reported by the Dolphins players and as shown by the evidence, is that Jonathan Martin was never bullied by Richie Incognito or any member of the Dolphins Offensive line. We are analyzing the entire report and will release a thorough analysis as soon as it is ready.”
Eleven years and four days later, we’re still waiting for the “thorough analysis” that Schamel promised.
Martin’s comments to ESPN.com aren’t it. If Incognito disputes any portion of the 140-page Wells report, Incognito has had more than a decade to make his case.
These facts surely won’t change a thing. Incognito prefers to focus on Martin’s more recent words and to ignore the many pages prepared by Wells and his team, after more than 100 people were interviewed and “thousands of voluntarily produced text messages” were reviewed.
The members of the blue-check-with-less-than-100-followers hive that insists on justice for Incognito won’t change their minds, either. Because none of them has the attention span, or the inclination, to make it to the bottom of this article.
Something very strange is happening on Twitter today. (Then again, it is a day ending in “Y.”)
The lengthy ESPN.com story about former Dolphins tackle Jonathan Martin, in which Martin says he never believed he was bullied by former Dolphins guard Richie Incognito and others in 2013, has sparked repeated cries from Incognito that he was completely exonerated. It also has stirred up a hive of previously dormant Richie stans to cheer him on.
Among other things, they’re telling him to sue everyone for defamation.
So let’s consider how a lawyer who got his or her law degree from anything other than the bottom of a box of stale Cracker Jack would evaluate a potential defamation lawsuit from Incognito.
For starters, truth is an absolute defense to any claim of libel (spoken defamation) or slander (written defamation). And one fairly clear kernel of truth comes from the April 6, 2013 voice message that Incognito left for Martin — and that his father, Gus, played for Antony Olvieri of ESPN.com. As quoted in Olvieri’s story, Incognito said this: “Hey, wassup, you half-n----- piece of s---. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. I’ll s--- in your f---ing mouth. I’m going to slap your f---ing mouth, I’m going to slap your real mother across the face. F--- you, you’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you.”
The words from Jonathan Martin that brought this 11-years-dead corpse of a story back to life weren’t that nothing ever happened and that he made it all up. Martin told Olvieri he never believed he was bullied, and that his parents pushed the issue.
The effort to push the issue resulted in the league hiring Ted Wells to investigate. Wells and his team did indeed investigate. They prepared and published a full report that contains specific factual findings about the things said and done, to Martin and others.
Now, is it possible that the Wells report was flawed? Roughly a year later, Wells’s work on the #Deflategate investigation prompted many to suspect that Wells may have started with his client’s preferred conclusion and worked backward to justify it. Maybe Wells did the same thing in the Martin-Incognito case.
Although the man who was accused of bullying Martin (but apparently not by Martin himself) is now using social media to bully members of the media into crying uncle on the notion that Incognito never engaged in any improper conduct, the truth is that he has a point regarding the Wells investigation. In August 2015, Incognito shared his lingering concerns about the Wells investigation with Bob Glauber of Newsday.
“Ted Wells came in with a mission against me,” Incognito told Glauber. “Ted Wells came in slanted against me and everything in his report was slanted against me. There were some things in there that would have helped my cause that were left out.”
On the day that the Wells report was released in February 2014, lawyer Mark Schamel said the report was “replete with errors,” that he would analyze the entire report, and that he would release a “thorough analysis” as soon as it was ready. We’re still waiting for that analysis to be released.
If there was any defamation of Incognito, it came from Ted Wells. He’s the one who made the various public statements about Incognito’s behavior. The league also would have potential liability given that the report was prepared at its request. (Incognito’s path to justice against the NFL likely would come from the Collective Bargaining Agreement, not the courts.)
While plenty of the members of #TeamRichie on Twitter are now rooting for lawsuits against various media outlets (ours included), we passed along the findings made by Wells and offered opinions about them. The media didn’t lie about Incognito. The media reported on written statements made by Wells about Incognito in a report that was released to the public.
The far bigger problem for Incognito comes from the statute of limitations. In most jurisdictions, you’ve got one year to sue for defamation. In no jurisdiction does a plaintiff have 10 or 12 or 20 to sue for libel or slander.
All that said, and despite the fact that Richie will never accept anything other than a full-throated shout of “RICHIE NEVER DID NOTHING” in satisfaction of his current complaints, his concerns about Wells aren’t unfounded.
Incognito never got a chance to test Wells’s findings within the confines of the league’s disciplinary procedures because the league never disciplined him. The Dolphins did, months before the Wells report was released. (That said, his lawyer could have released the “thorough analysis” of the Wells report at any time. In theory, the lawyer still could.)
Then there’s this. Even if Wells could sue Wells or the NFL or Martin or anyone and even if Incognito could satisfy the “actual malice” standard for defamation against public figures and even if Incognito could prove that he was indeed defamed, the damages would be determined in large part by determining the impact of the defamation on his pre-existing reputation. That would make every questionable thing he ever did before the Martin case fair game for full investigation before trial and potential introduction into evidence.
The effort to determine his pre-existing reputation possibly would begin with his alleged harassment of a female volunteer at the team’s charity golf outing in 2012. It prompted a police report, which alleged that he “used his golf club to touch her by rubbing it up against her vagina, then up her stomach then to her chest,” that he “then used the club to knock a pair of sunglasses off the top of her head,” that he “proceeded to lean up against her buttocks with his private parts as if dancing, saying ‘Let it rain! Let it rain!’,” and that he “finally finished his inappropriate behavior by emptying bottled water in her face.”
Those are just allegations. But if Incognito were to sue anyone for defamation as to the things said about him in the Wells report, the defense surely would include a full exploration of his behavior during that golf outing from a year earlier. And the defense would argue strenuously for the jury in the defamation case to hear all about it.
Of course, that won’t stop the XBros from chanting “Sue! Sue! Sue!” They’re clueless, and they always will be. None of them will even bother to read this. It’s too long. It requires reading comprehension and thought. And, most importantly, it undermines that which they choose to believe.
Which makes the resurrection of the Martin-Incognito case a perfect microcosm of the current state of our society. Truth isn’t truth. Truth is what we believe, fueled by a stubborn refusal to entertain any facts that might contradict those beliefs.
It started with a Wednesday #longread from ESPN.com that focused on the current whereabouts of former NFL tackle Jonathan Martin. Landing three days after the Super Bowl and more than a dozen years after long-forgotten events that once took the league by storm, it barely made a blip.
On the first Sunday since the conclusion of the 2024 season, it finally registered.
It’s not clear how it happened. The teammate at the center of the story — Richie Incognito — sent a direct message to the PFT Twitter account at 2:45 p.m. ET. on Sunday afternoon with a link to a column from Omar Kelly of the Miami Herald with this title: “Jonathan Martin admitted he lied about being bullied.”
Then, at 10:17 p.m. ET on Sunday night, Incognito sent a second direct message to the DM: “Care to comment? 🤣"
It’s unclear what else happened on Sunday to bring the ESPN.com story to the surface. At 4:09 p.m. ET, Adam Schefter of ESPN posted out of the blue a screen shot of a portion of the ESPN.com article in which Martin is quoted as saying this: “I never believed for a second I was being bullied. . . . It’s a story that I’ve been trying to fix for 10 years.”
Schefter called it a “notable excerpt.” Incognito, not recognizing that Schefter’s tweet actually did him a favor, replied with this: “Notable excerpt?! You tried to ruin my life over this bullshit.”
Tweeted Incognito at 5:18 p.m. ET regarding Martin: “He couldn’t cut it in the NFL so he quit and his mom blamed me. Legacy media pushed this narrative long and far. Too bad it was all a lie! They lied to protect his money. He quit… the team had every right to claw back that money. His mom started the bullying narrative with [ESPN].”
In fairness to Incognito, Martin’s recent comments support that conclusion.
“I had a situation with my teammates that I wasn’t super happy about,” Martin told Anthony Olvieri of ESPN.com in the lengthy article that went mostly unnoticed for days. “But my mother had her own read on the situation.”
“I didn’t believe any of the stances I was taking, right, where I’m this victim,” Martin added. “I wasn’t a victim, right? And, again, it’s been a point of consternation.”
Martin’s father, Gus, acknowledged to Olvieri that he and Martin’s mother “did strongly intervene” in order to “make sure he was protected.”
“My mother maybe in her mind -- I can’t read her mind -- she thought she was doing the right thing,” Jonathan Martin told Olvieri.
The article includes the text of a voice message that Incognito left to Jonathan Martin on April 6, 2013, less than a year after the Dolphins selected him in the second round of the draft: “Hey, wassup, you half-n----- piece of s---. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. I’ll s--- in your f---ing mouth. I’m going to slap your f---ing mouth, I’m going to slap your real mother across the face. F--- you, you’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you.”
That said, there’s a nuance to this that seems to be lost on many. It’s one thing for Jonathan Martin to say he never believed he was being bullied. It’s another thing to ignore the various findings from the extensive investigation that occurred at the time. (Here’s the summary of the report from Ted Wells, as posted by NFL.com at the time.)
Wells found that Incognito and others repeatedly harassed Martin. That the harassment contributed to Jonathan Martin’s pre-existing mental-health issues. That the harassment was consistent with workplace bullying. That, to the extent the conduct was a reflection of the prevailing culture among the Dolphins’ offensive linemen (and potentially if not likely in other NFL locker rooms), it does not excuse the behavior.
And the behavior went beyond Jonathan Martin. From the summary: “We found that the [Dolphins’] Assistant Trainer, who was born in Japan, was the target of frequent and persistent harassment, including insults relating to his race and national origin.”
To the extent that Incognito is now taking a victory lap, let’s remember that it’s not the only time his behavior got him in trouble.
So, yes, it’s far more complicated than an isolated comment from a man who is trying to put the incident in his past. In many respects, a locker room remains the last bastion of rough talk, whether it’s a billionaire-turned-politician explaining away a certain remark about grabbing women in a certain place or whether it’s athletes saying things to each other that they’d never knowingly say into a hot mic.
And there’s reason to think Jonathan Martin still has hard feelings about what happened, regardless of whether he’s willing to admit that a six-foot, five-inch, 315-pound football player tolerated harassment in silence, in lieu of cracking a few skulls. Asked by Olvieri whether he’d consider speaking with Incognito and other teammates who were found to have behaved improperly, Jonathan Martin provided a one-word answer: “No.”
If everything was fine, there’s no reason to not speak to them. Unless, of course, one or more of them continues to insist, well over a decade later, that the many things said and done were fine and dandy.
Ultimately, Incognito and others who were publicly chastised by the Wells report fell victim to the same mindset that fueled the punishments meted out a year earlier, in the Saints bullying scandal. Rather than admit that a significant cultural problem within the locker room at large needs to be addressed, the NFL grabbed a piece of low-hanging fruit, squished it, and hoped that the outcome would scare everyone else straight.
And let’s not forget the very real possibility that the Wells report on the bullying scandal had a preordained conclusion. The Wells’s report on the #Deflategate scandal little more than a year later supports a reasonable conclusion that the investigation started with the league’s preferred outcome and worked backward.
So, basically, the Incognito-Martin case alerted the NFL to a problem that had been festering under its nose for years if not decades, with the Dolphins and potentially if not likely elsewhere. Instead of acknowledging that fact (if it is factual) and embarking on the more difficult and delicate effort to change the league’s culture on a league-wide basis, Wells provided the NFL with the hammer necessary to create the impression that it was an aberration.
Even if it was anything but. Incognito’s point is that this is how things worked in locker rooms. It’s how players communicated with each other. In isolation, it looks and sounds bad.
Bad enough to get the league to circle the wagons and clutch its pearls, rather than acknowledging that this is how things worked, and that the league allowed it to happen until the shit hit the fan in Miami.
