If the Dolphins want to create breathing room, there’s one major lever they can pull. They can restructure Tagovailoa’s base salary.
I want to be clear that this does not mean that the Dolphins would
keep him. Tagovailoa is due a fully-guaranteed $39,000,000 base salary in 2026 no matter what the team does. But the team can choose when that dead cap hits. Up to $37,740,000 of Tagovailoa’s 2026 base salary is eligible for restructure. The Dolphins can defer up to $30,192,000 to future years in a maximum restructure and immediately clear that cap space (as well as $1,000,000 more in non-guaranteed per game and workout bonuses).
The Dolphins could execute this restructure before the season begins and the team must be cap compliant and then, after paying and pro-rating his $15 million fully-guaranteed option bonus in the first three days of the league year, designate Tagovailoa as one of the team’s two early post-June 1 releases, deferring almost all of his dead cap hit to 2027. Consider the year-by-year cap impacts for the remainder of his contract after such a sequence of transactions:
Year | Dead Cap | Savings |
|---|
2026 | $25,208,000 | $31,192,000 |
2027 | $73,992,000 | -$20,592,000 |
2028 | $0 | $65,800,000 |
2029 | $0 | $11,000,000 |
Normally in an early post-June 1 designation, the team must wait until June 2 to realize the cap savings. In this scenario, because the Dolphins execute the restructure as a separate transaction before exercising the early designation, they immediately realize $30,192,000 of the cap savings.
The downside is a nearly $74 million dead cap in 2027, but keep in mind in this scenario the Dolphins have executed this move to offset 2026 dead cap acceleration on other contracts. That acceleration onto 2026 also clears huge swathes of cap commitments from 2027. Before any of the proposed transactions, the Dolphins are on target to have just just under $81 million in salary cap space in 2027. In this hypothetical fire sale, trading Chubb, Sieler, and Waddle this season and releasing Hill after the season means the projected available cap jumps to just about $189 million, and that’s before considering any rollover from 2026. At that point, an extra $20.6 million in dead money for Tagovailoa is a drop in the bucket.
Theoretically, the Dolphins could even decline to hit Tagovailoa with the early post-June 1 designation and hold him until after June 2 and try to execute a trade then, though this carries the consequence of guaranteeing $3,000,000 of his 2027 salary.
