Greg Dulcich 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

Greg Dulcich out-gained every returning Miami wideout last season, and he did it in nine games, off the practice squad, for a team that had waived-or-released him twice by his twenty-fifth birthday. The market's response is tight end twenty-seven, pick one-eighty-five — a shrug with upside. Given the road here, the shrug might be the compliment.

The season: nine games by the stat rows after an October call-up, twenty-six catches on thirty-three targets — a seventy-nine percent catch rate — for three hundred thirty-five yards and a touchdown. Five-point-five Half-PPR points a game, thirty-second among tight ends per game, forty-fifth in total. Fifteen percent of Miami's targets in his games, and a closing kick worth noting: five catches for fifty-eight and the score in week seventeen. Modest numbers — but three hundred thirty-five yards was more than any wideout Miami brings back, and the team noticed.

The career reads like a lost-and-found ticket. Third round, Denver, twenty-twenty-two: a rookie flash of thirty-three catches for four hundred eleven and seven points a game. Then the hamstring years — two games in twenty-three, a November waiver, a Giants claim, a final-cut release last August — and a practice-squad signing in Miami that turned into the October promotion when Darren Waller went down. From flash to castoff to useful in four seasons flat.

The pattern beat: tight end targets are the position's stickiest stat — point-seven-two and point-eight-oh across the eras, two hundred fifty-one and two hundred thirty-eight seasons — and his three-point-seven a game is a real baseline that stickiness says repeats. What stickiness can't see: the rookie-flash version drew five and a half a game in Denver, and the tree above him just lost a hundred sixty-three targets of Hill, Waddle, and Waller. The gap between his baseline and this room's vacancy is the entire episode.

[[SITUATION]]

The situation is a prove-it deal in a room Miami deliberately crowded. He re-signed in March — one year, reported at up to three and a quarter million — with the general manager saying out loud that the back end of his season is why they brought him back. The June coverage calls him the top tight end on the depth chart and a candidate to be Malik Willis's safety valve, per NFL.com's offseason framing. Then April: Miami spent a third-round pick on Will Kacmarek and a fifth on Seydou Traore — two rookie tight ends behind a one-year veteran, which is a franchise saying compete, not keep. Waller isn't returning, Julian Hill left for New England, and the offense is Bobby Slowik's, attached to a quarterback on his first starting contract. Seven-and-ten last year, rebuilt everywhere.

The price: TE27 at pick one-eighty-five. The slot paid six-point-two last season; he produced five-point-five in the part-season audition. The market wants a half-step more than it's seen and priced it like it. [pause] Our verdict: no call. A minimum-risk contract and a pick-one-eighty-five price are the same sentence in two currencies — both say show us first — and we can't argue with either. The caveat, both directions: the vacated targets are real and he's the incumbent atop the depth chart, so the path to a TE-teens season exists in plain sight — and Miami just spent two draft picks saying the path isn't promised to him.

Watch the camp battle with Kacmarek first — a third-round rookie is the franchise's counter-argument — then whether the week-seventeen role survives contact with September, and where Willis's checkdowns actually land. The tree is open; the claim is unresolved. [[CLOSE]] If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.