MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — If the FOMO gets too great for the Miami Dolphins next Thursday night, as they watch teams turn in their first-round NFL Draft cards, there’s a plan in place: “We’ll just watch Tyreek highlights during the draft and it’ll make us feel good,” Dolphins general manager Chris Grier said Wednesday.
Tyreek is Tyreek Hill, the six-time Pro Bowl wide receiver the Dolphins acquired via trade last month. The price to land him was five draft picks, including the Dolphins’ first and second-rounders in 2022.
That means that, barring a trade up, the Dolphins won’t go on the clock for the first time until late Friday night. They have just four picks, none in the first round.
Is the Miami Dolphins’ new NFL Draft approach here to stay?
But unlike the Los Angeles Rams, whose live-in-the-moment worldview has birthed the great Les Snead “F them picks” meme, Grier probably won’t make a habit of trading tomorrow for today.
Instead, this year’s YOLO outlook was a function of a specific set of factors.
“I still believe in building through the draft,” Grier said during his pre-draft news conference. “I think the draft is an important way of building your team and having young assets to work through. But we’ve shown that we will always be aggressive if it comes to acquiring a good player — or at least attempting to, and we’ve done that.”
Despite their offseason fireworks, the Dolphins’ current nucleus is still largely homegrown. They’ve picked in the top 100 a staggering 11 times in the last two years, and they’re on track to have five more such picks in 2023.
They didn’t want to dip deep into their 2023 stash when they made the Hill deal. Miami even picked up another premium pick when they shipped DeVante Parker to the Patriots earlier this month.
“Not going to lie, it was important to us to keep those two [first-round] picks because we had done so much to acquire those before,” Grier said. “I think, for us, when you make a move for Tyreek like that, you also want to be prepared to have picks for the future. And having those two picks and picking up the pick for DeVante, another third gives us, you know, five picks in the first three rounds with two ones and two threes. We feel good about that heading into next year and 2023.”
That ammo gives the Dolphins the flexibility to move on from Tua Tagovailoa in 2023 if he doesn’t rise to the moment in 2022. (It should be said that the new coaching staff is “raving” about how Tua has looked early in the offseason program, per Grier.)
The team’s offseason maneuvering has left the Dolphins with very few needs heading into the NFL Draft. And that’s good, because the widespread opinion throughout the league is this draft isn’t particularly good, specifically at the top.
Was that a factor in the team’s decision to trade away every single one of their natural picks (all four they own in 2022 were acquired via trade)?
“Every draft has their strengths and weaknesses by position,” Grier said. “For us, trading those picks really had nothing to do with how the draft looked. It was the opportunity to acquire Tyreek Hill. Just a special talent for what we were looking for.
“At the end of the day, every draft will be judged three years from now, how it looks, and every year we go through where some people think it looks not strong or weak,” Grier added. “I think you really gotta give these kids three years to really develop and see where everything stands.”