The Dolphins took their time before starting the process of signing their 2026 draft picks, but they made up for their slow start by getting a lot of work done all at once.
They announced the signing of 10 draft picks, including second-round linebacker Jacob Rodriguez. Rodriguez was a first-team All-American at Texas Tech in 2025 after posting 128 tackles, 11 tackles for loss, seven forced fumbles, four interceptions and a sack for the Red Raiders.
Miami has also signed third-round wide receiver Caleb Douglas, third-round tight end Will Kacmarek, third-round wide receiver Chris Bell, fourth-round defensive end Trey Moore, fourth-round safety Kyle Louis, fifth-round safety Michael Taaffe, fifth-round wide receiver Kevin Coleman, sixth-round guard DJ Campbell, and seventh-round defensive end Max Llewellyn.
First-round picks Kadyn Proctor and Chris Johnson join fifth-round tight end Seydou Traore as the only unsigned picks.
Dolphins Clips
The 49ers signed safety Ashtyn Davis to a one-year deal, the team announced Tuesday.
In a corresponding move, the 49ers waived running back Jermar Jefferson.
Davis spent last season with the Dolphins, appearing in 15 games with 12 starts. He recorded 63 tackles, four passes defensed, one interception, one forced fumble and added two special teams tackles.
He entered the NFL as a third-round pick of the Jets in 2020 and spent five seasons in New York.
In his career, Davis has appeared in 84 games with 34 starts. He has totaled 217 tackles, 19 passes defensed, nine interceptions, five forced fumbles, four fumble recoveries and half a sack to go with 23 special teams tackles.
Jefferson signed with the 49ers on May 28.
The Dolphins are adding to their wide receiver room.
Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that they are signing Jalen Reagor to their 90-man roster.
Reagor spent the last two seasons with the Chargers, but did not play in any games during the 2025 campaign. He had seven catches for 100 yards in 2024.
The Eagles drafted Reagor in the first round in 2020 and traded him to the Vikings after two seasons. He spent one year in Minnesota and one year in New England. He has 86 career catches and has also returned one punt and one kickoff for touchdowns over the course of his career.
The Giants cut veteran kicker Jason Sanders on Tuesday. They needed the roster spot to get wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster on the roster.
Sanders’ departure leaves Ben Sauls and rookie Dominic Zvada as the kickers on the roster. Sauls was 8-for-8 on field goals for the Giants in 2025.
Sanders, who missed last season with a hip injury, signed with the Giants on March 10. He will leave a $100,000 dead cap hit for the Giants, with the other $200,000 of the guaranteed money containing offset language.
The Dolphins made Sanders a seventh-round pick in 2018, and in seven seasons in Miami, he made 84.6 percent of his field goals and 96.6 percent of his extra points. Sanders is 33-of-48 from beyond 50 yards with a career-long of 57 yards.
He made first-team All-Pro in 2020.
The Dolphins officially announced a number of previously reported additions to their personnel department on Monday and they also announced several title changes.
One of them involves Brandon Shore being promoted to executive vice president of football operations. Shore has been with the team since 2010 and was previously the senior vice president of football and business administration.
The Dolphins hired assistant general manager Kyle Smith, senior personnel executive Jon Robinson, senior personnel executive Shaun Herock, assistant director of player personnel Josh Scobey, director of pro scouting Venzell Boulware, pro scout Jack Schneider, director of strength and conditioning Todd Hunt, assistant director of strength and conditioning Willie Jones, and assistant strength and conditioning coach Ike Brown.
They also announced new titles for director of player personnel Matt Winston, director of college scouting Grant Wallace, college scout Owen Hartman, college scout Dylan Mabin, vice president of football administration and strategy Max Napolitano, and vice president of sports medicine and performance/head athletic trainer Kyle Johnston.
They have to install playing surfaces that meet exacting standards. They have to change the names of the facilities. They have to shut down all other business (such as major concerts) for the duration of the World Cup.
Given the hoops through which the 11 NFL stadiums will have to jump in order to placate FIFA, it’s fair to ask whether it’s worth it.
Ben Volin of the Boston Globe recently took a look at that question. Said an NFL official from a team that won’t be hosting any of the World Cup games, “I know more than a few teams weren’t disappointed to lose the bid.”
That could be sour grapes, because those who won the right to host the matches are crowing about it.
“Can’t sleep,” Cowboys owner and G.M. Jerry Jones said recently, per Volin. “This is a great chance to associate with the worldwide love with soccer, and lets us put a little notch on our belt and share it with what soccer’s about, too. They’ll never be able to take away that we held those games in that stadium.”
Cowboys executive Stephen Jones echoed the sentiment: “We’ll be shut down all summer. But it’s worth it. I mean, this is about brand and, you know, being a part of something special.”
The Joneses wanted to host the matches badly enough to give up their suite for the matches.
“I think I’ve got to go someplace else, but that was a part of it,” Jerry Jones said. “We did a lot of things to make this work.”
The Cowboys, Patriots, Falcons, Texans, Chargers/Rams, Giants/Jets, Chiefs, Seahawks, 49ers, Dolphins, and Eagles will be hosting World Cup games in their stadiums.
The total revenue is projected, per Volin, to be roughly $11 billion. FIFA will pay rent for the stadiums, while keeping the revenue from sponsorships, tickets, suites, merchandise, concessions, and parking.
So how much will the teams get for hosting the World Cup? Per Volin, the terms “have been kept under wraps.”
Given that folks like Jones are not known for doing bad deals, they’ll surely be making more money to host the World Cup matches than they would have made in a normal summer.
Still, it’s a headache. Extra work, extra expenses, extra hassles.
Not to mention the P.R. bruise that comes from the perception/reality that NFL owners who are giving FIFA the surfaces it demands while stubbornly refusing to do the same for pro football players.
Now that the Supreme Court has declined to accept the NFL’s last-ditch effort to force all or part of the Brian Flores case into arbitration, the litigation will finally get going.
And the going could get nasty.
By way of background, I have handled many employment cases. From both sides. After working for years at a firm that focused on representing corporate clients that had been sued (no matter how strong or weak a given case may have been), I decided that I was more interested in representing individuals who had cases I believed to be strong.
So I’ve been there, done that. Many times.
Here’s the reality. No company that has been sued for wrongful termination will admit it. The witnesses will have locked into their stories months before it’s time to take the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Proving that the party line is essentially a lie requires a relentless pursuit of circumstantial evidence to contradict the predictable denial of discrimination, retaliation, etc. (For example, if the plaintiff was fired for violating a specific workplace rule, it’s useful to show that others violated the same rule, without being fired or even disciplined.)
This means that, in the Flores case, his lawyers will aggressively pursue deposition testimony from a wide range of witnesses from the league office and the various teams that have been sued (so far, the Dolphins, Broncos, Giants, Texans, Cardinals, and Titans). Plenty of the witnesses (starting with the Commissioner and any owners) will not react well to being verbally poked, prodded, and pressed for anything beyond the predictable default position: “we didn’t do anything wrong.” These witnesses will emerge from the deposition process feeling anywhere from frustrated to flat-out pissed off.
Flores (along with the other plaintiffs, Steve Wilks and Ray Horton) will deal with the same kind of thing. The lawyers representing the NFL and its teams will look for anything they can find to make them look bad. They’ll dig and dig and dig some more to make the process as uncomfortable as it can be. They’ll throw mud at the wall. They’ll throw mud directly at the plaintiffs. They’ll try to catch them in any potential misstatement, big or small, that could then be characterized at trial as a lie.
In the deposition process, there’s a wide range of latitude when questioning a witness. With no jury present, the lawyers don’t have to worry about being so aggressive (to the point of being openly hostile) that it may alienate the people who will decide the case.
This is what I’d typically say to anyone who was interested in suing a current or former employer: “Think of the worst thing about yourself that you wouldn’t want other people to know. You don’t have to tell me what it is. Just think of what it is. Then, think of what would happen if that thing became public. And then assume that, at some point during this litigation, it will.”
The unofficial playbook for lawyers defending corporate clients against claims of illegal employment practices includes turning the tables on the plaintiff in the hopes of making the plaintiff look as bad as possible when it’s time to present the case to a jury. It gets messy. It gets ugly. And, like the Commissioner and owners who are questioned by Flores’s lawyers, Flores will emerge from his deposition feeling anywhere from frustrated to flat-out pissed off.
That’s how it goes. The discovery process becomes the legal equivalent of a street fight. Which could be bad for the league, the teams, and/or Flores, Wilks, and Horton.
As the snippets of deposition testimony come to light, it will be very good for my current business.
The recent amendment to the Brian Flores civil complaint adds new allegations regarding a “culture of retaliation,” based on his decision to assert his legal rights in court. In reviewing the document, something stood out.
In paragraph 235 of the third amended complaint, Flores alleges that the Dolphins failed to make contractually-required severance payments. In paragraph 236, Flores claims that the Dolphins also have tried to recover money already paid to Flores.
“To make matters worse, after this lawsuit was filed, the Dolphins filed a letter with Commissioner Goodell seeking an arbitration over claims that Mr. Flores should be required to return hundreds of thousands of dollars of earned income,” Flores alleges. “The only reason that the Dolphins filed this request is because Mr. Flores filed this suit and opposed the team’s discriminatory conduct.”
For now, there are no details about the alleged effort to recover from Flores money he had already been paid. (Most notably, what did Flores supposedly do that justifies seeking “hundreds of thousands of dollars of earned income”?) Those facts undoubtedly will emerge as the case proceeds.
The recent decision of the Supreme Court to not accept the NFL’s appeal on the issue of arbitration confirms that the case will proceed in court. Barring a settlement (and this could be a good time for the league to start making offers to Flores in an effort to keep all sorts of potentially unflattering facts from coming to light) much will be learned about all aspects of Flores’s claims against the NFL, the Dolphins, and multiple other teams.
Free agent running back Zamir White worked out for the Dolphins, Jeremy Fowler of ESPN reports.
White, 26, is expected to work out for other teams, Fowler adds.
White appeared in six games for the Raiders last season and had 12 rushes for 32 yards and four receptions for 24 yards.
The Raiders made White a fourth-round pick in 2022.
In four seasons, he has 198 attempts for 736 yards and two touchdowns in 45 games with nine starts. He has also caught 25 passes for 152 yards.
Dolphins head coach Jeff Hafley shared an update on running back De’Von Achane’s health at the start of a Wednesday press conference.
Achane has not been a full participant in the team’s offseason program and Hafley said that is because he had his shoulder “cleaned up” earlier this offseason. Achane missed the final game of the 2025 season because of the injury and Hafley said the team is bringing him along cautiously as they head toward training camp.
“He’s rehabbing right now, he’s doing well,” Hafley said. “You’ll see him out there doing some drills and doing some running around. You just will not see him in full team drills.”
The Dolphins signed Achane to a four-year, $64 million contract extension this month and it’s unlikely they would have taken that plunge while harboring reservations about his overall fitness, so Achane should be moving full speed ahead once the Dolphins need him.
