Should the sunk cost of a pair of recent draft picks worry Dolphins?
The Miami Dolphins’ rebuilding effort is just over 18 months old. This team is, in the grand scheme of things, still it its infancy. But despite the relative newness of everything that the Dolphins are undertaking with Chris Grier and Brian Flores at the helm, there are mulligans this team probably wishes it had already. One is the handling to the Minkah Fitzpatrick saga, although at the end of the day Fitzpatrick was a bad attitude and clearly thought he knew better than his coaches. So be it.
But Miami has an NFL Draft trend developing too — not the kind that you want, either.
For the second consecutive season, the Miami Dolphins will see a member of their rookie class fail to make it to the end of the season on the roster with the team. The Dolphins cut rookie DE/LB Curtis Weaver on Monday afternoon after it was discovered he’d suffered an injury and yesterday we learned he was claimed off the waiver wire by the Cleveland Browns. Weaver, who was a 5th-round pick in April’s draft, will not see a single snap for the Dolphins.
2019 held a similar fate for 2019 6th-round pick Isaiah Prince, who at least had the chance to play in a few games for Miami last season. Prince played 82 total snaps for the Dolphins before the team had seen enough and cut him in December of 2019.
Is this a troubling trend for Miami? The team only made 6 picks in the 2019 NFL Draft, nearly half as many as they made this past April. Can they afford to be coming up completely empty handed with some of these picks?
No one can. But, given the law of averages, literally everyone does. There is so much volatility in the back half of any NFL Draft and the expectations for 5th- and 6th-round draft picks should be a few years on the roster, tops. Sure there are exceptions to the rule. Miami just happened to see themselves draw unfortunate results on two picks outside the top-175 in Prince and Weaver. But also bear in mind this is a two-way street and Miami got WR Preston Williams and CB Nik Needham for no draft pick at all.
Ideally, Miami’s roster would still have their 2019 6th-round pick and their 2020 5th-round pick on it. But Miami apparently saw enough in both to know these weren’t players that needed to be highly coveted.
