Desperate times call for desperate measures for the Miami Dolphins as they pull one final lever for 2026
Desperate times call for desperate measures for the Miami Dolphins’ bookkeeping.
You’ve heard all about the Miami Dolphins‘ dire salary cap situation this season.
The dead money. The goodbyes. The lack of depth. But as the Dolphins try to survive the final stretch of this dramatic strategy, they’re tapping into a fairly unorthodox move now that the season has started. Miami is trying to squeeze every drop of proverbial blood out of the stone that is their current payroll situation. And in one final tweak, they found a few million bucks lying around for their emergency fund.
The Miami Dolphins just used one final accounting tweak to survive their 2026 roster purge
Austin Jackson, Greg Dulcich, JuJu Brents, and Zach Sieler. All four players were a part of Miami’s recent, final tweak of the books. In total, Miami has nickel-and-dime’d a final pinch of cap relief out of this roster, which has yielded somewhere in the ballpark of $2.5 million in added salary cap space.
Why would the Dolphins do this? Is some grand signing coming down the pipe? No, probably not. In all reality, Miami needs as much wiggle room as they can gather in the event that injuries blitz their roster this season and they need to sign new players to fill 53-man roster spots. These accounting tweaks leave Miami with approximately $8.77 million in room.
You may hear a knock about how the Dolphins pushed debt into the future with these moves. But it’s worth remembering that if you don’t use cap space, you don’t lose it. You can carry it over year to year. So Miami, in the event they don’t need this new space, can bring it with them into 2027 to offset what they just pushed out into the future.
Why do it now? Because at this stage, every week you wait is another week of base salary that’s been paid out. That means you can divide a smaller slice of the total money each week — and get less relief as a result.
If the objective here is to buy as much flexibility as possible to survive the season, now was the only time to do it. These are trying times. Miami sits at just short of $183 million in dead cap charges for this season. But thankfully the black cloud is (mostly) in the rearview mirror. And getting smaller by the day.
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