When Miami Dolphins wideout Tyreek Hill was last seen on an NFL field for a regular-season game, his conduct was unbecoming of a team captain.
Coach Mike McDaniel hasn't forgotten. When the Dolphins players voted to elect team captains, they did not select Hill for the first time since he became a Dolphin in 2022. Tua Tagovailoa, Aaron Brewer, Alec Ingold, Jordyn Brooks, Zach Sieler, and Bradley Chubb earned the nods.
So, what does it have to do with McDaniel? This year, he chose to have two fewer captains than last year, when the team elected eight players. That new cutline may have excluded Hill from the captaincy. And that may be by design, according to The Palm Beach Post NFL insider Hal Habib.
"What we have here, it seems, is the first case of gerrymandering, NFL-style," Habib wrote. "When the Miami Dolphins revealed their long-anticipated team captains for 2025, there were no surprises on the list. It’s who wasn’t on the list that caught the eye ... Stripped of the ‘C’ for the first time as a Dolphin: Tyreek Hill."
Under coach Mike McDaniel, the Dolphins have never had as few as six team captains. They had seven in each of his first two seasons and eight last year. McDaniel explained that by saying the disparity between the player finishing sixth in the voting and the rest of the pack was so large, he drew the cut line at six.
Habib has a feeling Hill was just on the other side of the cut line.
"We’ll never know who unlucky No. 7 was, even though we kinda, possibly, maybe do know," Habib said. "And since we started down this path of reading between the lines, let’s continue."
As a refresher, Hill removed himself from last year's season finale, and then later said he wanted to be traded to another team. Now entering the season on "The Hot Seat" to be the first coach fired, McDaniel may be distancing himself from Hill, according to Habib.
"This is a team that has spent months professing to have undergone a culture transplant," Habib said. "For players to turn around and name Hill as one of their leaders as if “I’m out” were never uttered? It was never going to pass the optics test. Not this soon."
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