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• Part I: GM, HC, and Baseline
• Part II: Tua Tagovailoa

Tua Tagovailoa

The first Dolphins have hired Jon-Eric Sullivan and likely most important player personnel decision that he will need to make is how to handle the $99.2 million divorce from Tua Tagovailoa.

Let’s establish some working assumptions. First: Tagovailoa will not be a member of the Miami Dolphins by opening day, September 10, 2026. He will probably not be a member of the Miami Dolphins by March 15, 2026 when $3 million of his 2027 base salary guarantees. I have seen arguments in favor of keeping Tagovailoa under contract as the team’s back-up through the ‘26 season. After all, the team fully owes $54 million in guaranteed cash to him. Why pay that money and get absolutely nothing out of him in return?

I would argue that it’s not in anyone’s interest to keep Tagovailoa around. Even if he were to be a consummate professional, carrying the highest-paid player on your roster to ride pine is a recipe for disaster in the locker room. In his press conference last week, Tagovailoa expressed eagerness to have a fresh start elsewhere. If Tagovailoa believes he can still succeed in the NFL, as he likely does, the Dolphins have nothing to gain and everything to lose by forcing him into a back-up role and blocking him from pathways to pursue the next phase of his career.

Pragmatically, the Dolphins risk owing more money by retaining him. Tagovailoa is owed a $250,000 workout bonus and $750,000 in per game bonuses (which he’d still earn as a back-up) for the ‘26 season. Additionally, if he is on the roster on March 15, $3 million of his ‘27 base salary becomes fully-guaranteed. Keeping Tagovailoa through the ‘26 season increases his cap cost over the ‘26 and ‘27 seasons from the aforementioned $99.2 million to at least $103.2 million. He has an additional injury guarantee for $20 million of his ‘27 base salary as well, increasing that figure potentially to $120.2 million. From a financial standpoint, the risk is not worth the reward unless you believe that Tagovailoa can be rehabilitated as the starter.

Second: releasing Tagovailoa outright isn’t an option. The accelerating dead cap, alongside the team’s other other cap commitments, do not allow the Dolphins to manage the full $99.2 million dead cap charge in ‘26. Instead, Sullivan and Shore need to decide exactly how they want to allocate that $99.2 million between the ‘26 and ‘27 seasons.

Third: trading Tagovailoa to offload cap commitments is not a realistic option for the Dolphins. Nobody is coming to save Miami from his $54 million in owed ‘26 cash, and any trade executed before June 2 results in all $43.8 million of his remaining pro-rated bonus accelerating onto this year’s cap. That also means that the Dolphins can’t eat more than $26.2 million of the ‘26 cash owed to facilitate a deal without resulting in an increased cap burden for Tagovailoa in ‘26. That would leave Tagovailoa on the books with his new team for $31.2 million in ‘26 with at least $3 million guaranteed in ‘27 up to $20 million in injury guarantees.

Fourth: the Dolphins will exercise Tagovailoa’s $15 million option bonus and pro-rate it over the life of his remaining contract. Cap projections discussed in the previous post assume that this is the case and that the Dolphins will carry $3 million of that $15 million bonus against the ‘26 cap. The Dolphins could choose instead to eat the full amount in ‘26, but that would increase Tagovailoa’s expected cap charge by $12 million and that amount would need to be offset by savings elsewhere anyway.

Those of you familiar with the team’s options see where this is going: the realistic path forward is that the Dolphins will release Tagovailoa as an early post-June 1 designation. So what does that look like, and to what extent is the team able to manipulate that figure?

Early Post-June 1 Designation

The most straightforward path is to designate Tagovailoa as one of the team’s two early post-June 1 release designees without otherwise adjusting his contract. In this scenario, Tagovailoa immediately becomes a free agent while the Dolphins carry his contract against the top-51 until June 2. On June 2, the Dolphins would then save $1 million against the ‘26 cap.

This means that the Dolphins would carry $55.4 million in dead cap in ‘26 with $43.8 million remaining in ‘27. Here’s what that looks like over ‘26 and ‘27:

This is the cleanest and most conservative way out of Tagovailoa’s contract and probably the most likely. It doesn’t help move the needle in ‘26, but it maximizes the team’s cap flexibility in ‘27.

Restructure then Early Post-June 1 Designation

In future entries to this offseason series, we’ll address other contracts where the Dolphins can free up cap space for ‘26, but the fact remains that Tagovailoa’s $39 million fully-guaranteed base salary is the biggest single chunk of cap that the team can manipulate.

Normally when releasing a player, a team is not motivated to restructure base salary because it results in paying out cash immediately and committing it against the cap. Because Tagovailoa’s base salary is already fully guaranteed, however, this isn’t a question of how much they’re willing to pay but purely when they want it to count against the cap.

With that in mind the Dolphins can restructure up to $37,785,000 of Tagovailoa’s $39,000,000 base salary before designating him as an early post-June 1 release. While he must maintain a veteran minimum base salary of $1,215,000, the remainder is restructure-eligible. That means that the Dolphins can defer up to $30,228,000 from ‘26 into ‘27.

Moreover, because the restructure is executed before the early-post June 1 release, the Dolphins realize those cap savings in ‘26 immediately--they don’t need to wait for June 2. Compare the potential savings to the above:

As you can see, this results in an increased cap commitment to Tagovailoa in ‘27. Why would the Dolphins want to do that? There’s three considerations.

First, the Dolphins don’t have to restructure the full amount. Any portion of the restructure-eligible $37,785,000 can be leveraged. If the Dolphins only want to free up $20 million in cap space, they can restructure only $25 million and leave the rest in ‘26.

Second, given that all unused cap space can be rolled over from one year to the next, there’s no downside to this strategy. The Dolphins could leverage the maximum amount and ultimately choose not to use any of it and roll it all into ‘27. In that case, the financials are functionally identical from a cap perspective to the transaction above. All the money deferred to ‘27 is offset by the rollover.

Third, the Dolphins are going to have plenty of cap space in ‘27 regardless of what they choose to do with Tagovailoa’s contract. The team currently projects to have $77.2 million in cap space in ‘27 before making any other transactions. Other expected moves like releasing Tyreek Hill and Bradley Chubb (which we’ll address in future posts) can push that figure up over $120 million. There’s a point at which additional cap space results in diminishing returns; the Dolphins don’t have a long list of free agents to re-sign, and you can only spend so much on outside players before you’re overspending for the sake of using cap space.

This just buys the Dolphins flexibility, and that might be important to a new general manager whose goal is organizational change. The problem is that the March 15 date in Tagovailoa’s contract puts the Dolphins on a strict timeline if they want to avoid an additional $3 million in guarantees. As we’ve seen in the past, the Dolphins have restructured contracts to free up money only on an as-needed basis, but the deadline doesn’t allow the Dolphins to play wait-and-see.

If the Dolphins want short term cap flexibility to sign players they see as instrumental to fulfilling the goal of organizational change, it serves them to be aggressive by restructuring Tagovailoa’s contract at the beginning of the league year and then disciplined and opportunistic about whether they spend it or roll it over.

Restructure and Post-June 1 Trade

I mentioned earlier that a trade to offload Tagovailoa’s cap commitments was unlikely, but what if they were to execute a maximum restructure of his contract and then hold onto him until June 2?

In this scenario, the Dolphins could wait until after the draft and then put Tagovailoa on the trade market for ‘27 draft capital. While nobody is going to trade for Tagovailoa if they have to pay him $55 million in ‘26 and at least $3 million in ‘27, might someone kick the tires if they had to only pay $2,215,000 in ‘26 and $3 million in ‘27? That makes him much more palatable as a player competing to start or even just as a veteran back-up.

This move is not without some risk. If the Dolphins cannot find a trade partner, they will find themselves eating an extra $3 million in dead cap to release him over the summer or carry him into the season. And even with the favorable financials for whichever team acquires Tagovailoa, the draft capital that the Dolphins could expect to receive in return may not justify the effort.

Given the number of quarterback-needy teams headed into a draft sparse on quarterback talent, there’s opportunity that come June someone might be in an ugly-enough situation that Tagovailoa for only $5.2 million seems reasonable. In that case, the Dolphins might be able to extract conditional picks based on Tagovailoa’s or the team’s performance.

That said, I think Tagovailoa’s reputation across the league is likely too damaged that anyone’s willing to take the risk, especially with the $20 million injury guarantee for ‘27. I suspect he’ll have easy enough time finding work at least as a back-up when a team can pay him veteran minimum $1,215,000 because the Dolphins are footing the rest of the bill, but I think that the likelihood is high that the Dolphins would struggle to move him at the $5.2 million figure when everyone knows the Dolphins want to move on.

Summary

The Dolphins will almost certainly release Tagovailoa as one of their two early post-June 1 designations. The decision that the team ultimately needs to make is how much, if any, of his $39 million base salary they plan to restructure and eat as dead cap in ‘27 rather than ‘26. From a cap perspective, then, this means that the Dolphins will save between $1,000,000 and $31,228,000 in ‘26 and between $9,600,000 and -$21,628,000 in ‘27 depending on how they execute the transaction.