Malik Willis 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

Miami guaranteed Malik Willis forty-five million dollars and the starting job this March. The NFL record behind that bet: nineteen games across four seasons, never more than seven in any of them, six career starts. Quarterback twenty-one, pick one-thirty-one, is the market pricing a job — because there is almost nothing else to price.

The twenty-twenty-five sample, all of it: four games in relief for Green Bay. Thirty of thirty-five passing — an eighty-six percent completion rate — for four hundred twenty-two yards, three touchdowns, no picks, plus a hundred twenty-three rushing yards and two more scores on the ground. On quarterback scoring — the standard four-point-passing convention we use, identical to Half-PPR for quarterbacks — that's twelve-point-eight points a game in the games he played. We will not hang a positional rank on four games, and neither should anyone selling you one.

The career is a stack of these slivers: seven games as a Tennessee rookie, two the next year, six after the trade to Green Bay, four last season. What the slivers agree on: the legs are the profile. Nearly half of last season's fantasy production came from rushing — on a sample too small to lean on, but it's the same shape every stop.

Which is why the pattern beat here is short and mostly a warning about what we can't do. Our rushing-quarterback rule — top-six seasons built on twenty-five-percent-plus rushing production repeat at sixty-one percent versus twenty-four for pocket passers — conditions on full seasons that exist. He has never played one. No pattern in our library conditions on a coaching staff's conviction, and conviction is the entire case.

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So here is the conviction, dated. Miami released Tua Tagovailoa in March — eating a record dead-money charge, per ESPN — and signed Willis days later: three years, sixty-seven and a half million, forty-five fully guaranteed, per NFL.com. ESPN's signing story said it plainly: the deal makes him the starter for twenty-twenty-six. The architects know him — head coach Jeff Hafley and the new general manager both arrived from Green Bay — and the offense belongs to coordinator Bobby Slowik, with Nathaniel Hackett coaching the room. The supporting cast was stripped to the studs: Jaylen Waddle traded to Denver in March for a package headlined by the thirtieth pick, Tyreek Hill released off a knee injury, per NFL.com — leaving Malik Washington, Jalen Tolbert, Tutu Atwell, and a rookie. The line got the twelfth pick, tackle Kadyn Proctor. June minicamp was honest work: a few interceptions across the sessions, per ESPN, and a head coach praising his growing command of the huddle. Quinn Ewers runs second.

The price: QB21 at pick one-thirty-one buys a declared starter on a seven-and-ten roster in year one of a rebuild, with nineteen games of evidence. [pause] Our verdict: watchlist. We can't underwrite a record that doesn't exist, and we won't fade forty-five million guaranteed and a handed job either — that combination is exactly what our library has no cohort for. The caveat, spoken both ways: a rushing quarterback with a locked job has the highest fantasy floor per unit of talent in this game, and if the efficiency of those four games survives contact with seventeen, QB21 is theft. If it doesn't, you drafted a preseason narrative.

Watch two things in August: whether the designed-run rate follows him from the Green Bay cameos, and how the young receiver room separates — somebody has to catch it. Four games of eighty-six percent says the arm caught up to the legs; camp says whether that was a sample or a mirage. [[CLOSE]] If he's on your roster, this show covers all of it — every player, every week, all season.