Miami Dolphins 2026: The Coverage Report — 87 Graded Cutdown Calls, Zero Misses, and Not One About Who Got Cut

This is the Miami entry in our post-cutdown series, one report per club: how the outlets we track covered the team, measured against what actually happened. One caveat up front, said once and meant throughout — this measures the sources in the MissedTakes database, not all football media. A pundit or a beat writer we don't ingest doesn't show up here at all.

Coverage: dead center of the league

Miami has 665 tracked takes, 266 of them graded. Across all 32 clubs that puts the Dolphins 14th in raw volume and 13th in graded volume — the middle of the distribution, closer to the top than the bottom. For scale, the Buffalo Bills lead the league with 1,050 takes and 527 graded; the Arizona Cardinals sit last with 466 and 144.

So this is not a neglected team in our data. That matters, because Miami's on-field résumé doesn't obviously demand attention: the Dolphins went 7-10 in 2025 and 8-9 in 2024, and their last playoff appearance in our records is 2023. The coverage is roughly what a mid-table AFC East club draws.

What's unusual is the grade. Miami's tracked takes average 72.0 accuracy and +38.3 skill versus a naive baseline — third-best of the 32 clubs on both measures, behind Seattle (74.9) and Carolina (73.6). That is not a statement about Dolphins pundits being smarter. It's a composition effect, and the composition is one man's roster projections.

The cutdown: 87 graded calls, all of them hits

Roster-spot calls are the news hook of this series, and Miami has a big pile of them: 156 tracked roster-spot takes, 87 graded, 69 still pending. The graded 87 average 100.0 accuracy and +59.8 skill.

Every single one hit. We sorted the whole set worst-first and the bottom of the list is still 100.

Before that reads as a triumph, look at what got graded. Every settled Miami roster call is a *he makes the 53* call. The cut-side claims — the ones with real risk in them — are all still pending. The grading engine baselines each name against whether he was on somebody's 53 the year before, so naming a returning veteran scores 100 accuracy and +0 skill; naming a first-year player who sticks scores 100 and +200.

That's where the actual credit lives, and it belongs almost entirely to Alain Poupart of Sports Illustrated, who owns 84 of the 87 graded calls. His third 53-man projection, published August 9, put rookies Kadyn Proctor, Caleb Douglas, Kevin Coleman, Kyle Louis and Michael Taaffe on the roster, plus long snapper Tucker Addington — six +200s in one article. His August 21 tiers piece filed Louis and Taaffe under "THE BORDERLINE LOCKS (8)" and got both. His cutdown-eve preview on August 28 named Douglas, Coleman and tight end Will Kacmarek among the receivers and tight ends with "intrigue," and all three stuck. Tyler DeSena supplied one of the other three graded calls, on Malik Washington as a lock.

The graded surprises we'd normally lead with do not exist yet. There is no Miami roster-spot miss on the board, in either direction, because nothing on the cut side has settled. Poupart's flat call that quarterback Mark Gronowski "is as good as gone," his warning that Jalen Tolbert and Tutu Atwell were "in danger, if not outright on their way out," his waiver-claim board led by RB Jarquez Hunter, and Nathan Jahnke's PFF note that Jalen Reagor's spot was "in jeopardy" — all pending. Come back when those grade; that half of the exercise is the hard half.

The draft: the biggest graded pile, and a total whiff on the actual pick

Mock draft picks are Miami's largest graded category — 110 graded of 133 tracked, 59.5 accuracy, +34.1 skill.

The tracked field converged hard on Miami picking at No. 11 and taking an offensive tackle or a premium defender: Spencer Fano (Jordan Reid, Nick Wright, Pat Fitzmaurice, Andrew Erickson), Francis Mauigoa (Mel Kiper, JP Acosta), Caleb Downs (Daniel Jeremiah), Kenyon Sadiq (Bucky Brooks, Jaime Eisner).

Miami picked 12th, and took Kadyn Proctor. Then 27th, for CB Chris Johnson.

Here's the part worth sitting with: the site tracks 38 graded mock calls on Proctor, and not one of them sends him to Miami. He was mocked to Detroit (seven times), Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, the Chargers, the 49ers, Tampa Bay, Kansas City, the Jets, Houston and Pittsburgh. Several of those score well, because mock grading measures the *slot*, not the team match — Mike Renner calling him a first-rounder scored 100, Kiper at No. 17 scored 80.52 against an actual pick of 12. Fine as pick-accuracy. But if you read those mocks to learn what the Dolphins would do, they told you nothing.

Everything else Miami pundits got graded on

The non-roster, non-draft record is thin per category and mostly negative:

• Game outcome picks — 10 graded, 40.0 accuracy, −90.6 skill, the worst category on the team. Week 1 of 2025 did most of the damage: Gregg Rosenthal, Patrick Claybon and Nick Wright all liked Miami at Indianapolis, which ended 8-33.
• Trade and signing calls — 10 graded, 20.0 accuracy, −70 skill. Miami was a magnet for landing-spot guesses that didn't land: Tom Pelissero and Jake Ciely both put Malik Willis in Miami, Tom Strachan sent Dallas Goedert and Romeo Doubs there. All graded 0 against the players staying put. (Worth flagging: Poupart's August roster work has Willis as Miami's starting quarterback, and the site lists him among Miami's notable players — so this is a category where the grading window and the roster reality are pointed in different directions.)
• Season win totals — only four tracked calls on Miami's 2025 season, against an actual seven wins: Brady Quinn and Nick Wright at 7, John Middlekauff at 5, LaVar Arrington at 4. Four calls is not a consensus; it's a handful.
• Sleepers, busts, depth chart, positional finishes — between five and nine graded each. Too thin to rank anyone on.

By position room, receiver is where the tracked coverage goes: 140 WR takes, 63 graded, 71.1 accuracy. Quarterback draws the second-most chatter (121 takes) but only 17 graded, at 58.8 accuracy and −20.6 skill — a lot of talk, little of it in a form that settles.

Who has actually earned a record here

Eleven pundits clear five graded Miami takes. Only three clear ten.

At the outlet level it's the same shape: Sports Illustrated has 87 graded Miami takes at 100.0 accuracy, The Herd 43 at 62.1, The Draft Network 25 at 32.0.

Poupart's overall site record — 84 graded, 100.0 accuracy, a MissedTakes Score of 52.27 — is higher than anything on the published leaderboard, where Lance Zierlein leads at 39.1. It is also marked provisional and excluded from that board, and it should be: four articles, one prediction type, and the only half of that type that has graded so far is the half where you get credit for naming players who make the team. Ask again when the cuts settle.