September 25, 2026
September 25, 2026
Miami Dolphins 2025 Season
The Dolphins’ 2025 season opened with a front office desperate to prove the year before had been a fluke. It closed with the general manager gone and the head coach gone. A franchise quarterback sat benched for a seventh-round rookie. Miami finished 7-10. The playoff victory drought stretched to 25 seasons, the longest active streak in the league. Along the way, the roster clawed back from 2-7 into the middle of a wild-card race, only for Pittsburgh to slam the door shut in December. The Dolphins’ 2025 season delivered enough whiplash for three franchises. It never settled the one question hanging over the whole operation: whether Tua Tagovailoa is still the answer at quarterback.
Miami blew up a piece of its own defense before training camp even opened. The front office shipped cornerback Jalen Ramsey and tight end Jonnu Smith to Pittsburgh. In return came safety Minkah Fitzpatrick and a swap of draft position. It was a stunning reversal for a front office that had built its secondary around Ramsey only three years earlier. The trade bet on Fitzpatrick’s steadiness over Ramsey’s star power. That bet would be tested the moment the pads came on.
Chris Grier used the draft to armor up in the trenches rather than chase a splash name. Miami’s full 2025 draft class opened with defensive tackle Kenneth Grant at No. 13 overall, a Michigan product built to anchor the interior. Guard Jonah Savaiinaea followed in the second round, addressing a line that had failed to protect Tagovailoa. Later rounds brought nose tackle Jordan Phillips and cornerback Jason Marshall Jr. A seventh-round quarterback named Quinn Ewers arrived almost as an afterthought. Nobody in the building treated that pick as anything more than developmental insurance. By December, it mattered more than anyone in April could have guessed.
The season did not merely start poorly. It unraveled from the opening whistle. Miami fell 33-8 at Indianapolis. A 33-27 home loss to New England followed. Buffalo then buried the Dolphins at 0-3 with a 31-21 win. The offensive line issues the draft was supposed to fix showed up immediately. Tagovailoa looked like a quarterback under siege, not one building toward a playoff push. A Week 4 win over the Jets finally broke the skid, 27-21. The relief did not last past the final whistle. Tyreek Hill tore ligaments in his knee that same afternoon and was lost for the year. The offense had just given up its most explosive weapon at the exact moment it needed him most. Every route concept built around stretching a defense vertically now had to be reworked on the fly, and there was no ready replacement waiting on the roster.
Miami’s season had no floor left, and it kept falling anyway. Three more losses followed Hill’s injury, dropping the Dolphins to 1-6. The offense had lost its identity along with its top receiver. An upset win at Atlanta, 34-10, offered a flicker of stability. Baltimore snuffed it out a week later with a 28-6 rout that exposed how far the roster had regressed. That loss became the breaking point. Reports of dysfunction were spreading through the building, and the record sat at 2-7. Two days before the trade deadline, Miami parted ways with Grier, the general manager who had built the roster over more than a decade. Champ Kelly stepped in as interim general manager. He inherited a season that looked all but buried.
Kelly’s arrival coincided with the sharpest turnaround of Miami’s year. The Dolphins seized a 30-13 win over Buffalo that flipped the tenor of the locker room. They then traveled to Spain for the first NFL regular-season game ever played there. Miami survived Washington in overtime at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu. The 16-13 victory felt more like a playoff scrap than a midseason curiosity. The setting was foreign. The resolve was not, and Miami suddenly looked like a team that believed in itself again.
Momentum builds fastest when nobody expects it, and Miami kept riding it. The Dolphins beat New Orleans 21-17 to push the streak to three. They blew out the Jets 34-10 to make it four straight. A team left for dead at 2-7 had clawed to 6-7. For the first time all season, the AFC’s playoff picture had to account for Miami. The run did not erase the earlier collapse. It proved the roster still had fight in it, and that fight was about to face its harshest test yet.
Everything Miami had rebuilt over four weeks came down to one December afternoon, and Pittsburgh tore it apart. The Steelers still held Ramsey and Smith from the offseason trade. They beat the Dolphins 28-15 and eliminated Miami from playoff contention in the same afternoon. The defeat did more than end a win streak. It closed the door on the only story the Dolphins’ 2025 season had left to tell, that a 2-7 start could still end in January football. Tagovailoa struggled again in the loss. Within days, frustration that had simmered all season finally broke through in public.
Tagovailoa’s comments criticizing his own teammates drew swift, unusual scrutiny for a quarterback with three years of starts behind him. Miami’s coaching staff had seen enough. The Dolphins benched Tagovailoa in favor of seventh-round rookie Quinn Ewers for a Week 16 date with Cincinnati. The call would have been unthinkable back in September. Ewers lost his debut badly, 45-21, in a game that read like a team playing out the string. Miami found one more jolt of pride in Week 17, beating Tampa Bay 20-17. A 38-10 loss at New England closed the book. The season had tested every corner of the organization.
Individual performances offered something to build on even as the team record buckled. Linebacker Jordyn Brooks earned first-team All-Pro honors. He anchored a defense that kept games competitive even when the offense stalled. Center Aaron Brewer made second-team All-Pro, holding together a line battered by injury all year. Running back De’Von Achane earned a Pro Bowl nod for his work as both a runner and receiver. He filled part of the void Hill left behind. None of it changed the standings. All of it gave the front office something concrete to build around, proof that the roster’s foundation was sturdier than a 7-10 record suggested.
A 7-10 finish and a third-place standing in the AFC East do not sound catastrophic on paper. They feel that way in south Florida, where a playoff win has not happened since the 2000 season. The wait has now stretched to 25 years, the longest active drought in the NFL. Mike McDaniel’s firing on January 8 ended his four-year tenure. It included a 2023 playoff berth but never the breakthrough Miami craved. The Dolphins’ 2025 season will be remembered less for the 2-7 nightmare or the four-game rescue. It will be remembered for what came after both. A benched franchise quarterback. A fired general manager. A coaching search that will decide whether Tagovailoa gets another chance to prove Miami right. The roster showed enough life in November to suggest the pieces are not far apart. Whether the next regime can assemble them into a winner is the question that will define whatever comes next for a franchise that has waited a quarter century for one more playoff win.
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