Five years later, Matt Breida is going back to where his NFL career started.
Via Jeremy Fowler of ESPN.com, Breida is signing with the 49ers.
He spent three seasons in San Francisco, from 2017 to 2019. He was traded to the Dolphins in 2020. He spent 2021 with the Bills and 2022 and 2023 with the Giants.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, Breida tried out for the 49ers on Monday, along with running backs Anthony McFarland and Ke’Shawn Vaughn.
In seven NFL seasons, the 29-year-old Breida has 2,652 regular-season rushing yards, 935 receiving yards, and 15 touchdowns.
The 49ers currently have six other running backs on the roster, led by 2023 NFL offensive player of the year Christian McCaffrey.
The Seahawks are close to a deal with free agent offensive lineman Connor Williams.
Williams’ agent, Drew Rosenhaus, told the Joe Rose radio show on Monday that he expects to reach agreement with Seattle in the next 48-72 hours.
Williams worked out for the Seahawks on July 22.
He is coming back from a “significant” knee injury that included a torn ACL during a Dec. 11 game against the Titans. Rosenhaus, though, said Williams is “healthy.”
“He’s going to be able to play in the first game,” Rosenhaus told Rose, via Scott Saloman of SI.com. “It is the most amazing recovery I have ever seen in my career.”
Williams moved from guard to center after signing a two-year deal with the Dolphins in 2022 and became a solid starting center. He became a free agent this offseason, and the Dolphins replaced him by signing former Titans center Aaron Brewer to a three-year, $21 million deal.
Williams is one of the few players remaining on PFT’s list of top-100 free agents.
Over the weekend, the Dolphins and receiver Tyreek Hill worked out a revision to his existing contract.
Setting aside any of the spin (and there’s plenty of it out there), here are the full and complete details of the new three-year deal, which replaces the prior three years remaining on his deal.
1. Signing bonus: $7 million.
2. 2024 90-man roster bonus: $17.04 million, fully guaranteed.
3. 2024 base salary: $1.21 million, fully guaranteed.
4. 2024 per-game roster bonus: $1 million total, fully guaranteed but must be earned.
5. 2025 option bonus $15.85 million, fully guaranteed.
6. 2025 workout bonus: $100,000, fully guaranteed but must be earned.
7. 2025 base salary: $10 million, fully guaranteed.
8. 2025 per-game roster bonus: $1.8 million total, fully guaranteed but must be earned.
9. 2026 offseason roster bonus: $5 million, due on the third day of the 2026 league year.
10. 2026 workout bonus: $100,000.
11. 2026 base salary: $29.9 million.
12. 2026 per-game roster bonus: $1 million total.
Hill’s compensation for 2026 is not guaranteed at signing. As of 2026, $11 million of the $36 million becomes fully guaranteed.
The deal also includes a maximum annual incentive of $500,000 for more than 50 percent playing time in a playoff game and a playoff game win.
The deal increases his pay for the next two years by $11.4 million. It reduces his prior $45 million compensation package for 2026 to $36 million.
It’s basically a two-year, $54 million deal. Of that amount, $2.8 million of it is tied to playing in 34 regular season games. For 2024, he loses $58,823 for each game missed. In 2025, he loses $105,882 for each game missed.
He was due to make $42.6 million over the next two years. He now gets $54 million, with no additional commitment to the team. It’s an $11.4 million raise.
Still, the Dolphins will have to decide whether to pay him $36 million in 2026. They can walk away if they want. Just as it was in the prior deal.
Or they could, after this season, move some money around again — and maybe add a year or two to the deal. For now, the bottom line is that he gets an $11 million raise over the next two years, and his compensation is fully guaranteed (subject to $2.9 million that must be earned, in per-game roster bonuses and workout bonus).
The Dolphins announced the newest member of their Ring of Honor on Monday.
Former defensive tackle Tim Bowens has been selected as the 28th member of the group. Bowens will be officially inducted during the team’s Week Eight home game against the Cardinals.
It is the first addition to the team’s Ring of Honor since Manny Fernandez in December 2014.
Bowens was the 1994 defensive rookie of the year after the Dolphins took him 20th overall earlier that year and he made two Pro Bowls during a run in Miami that ended after the 2004 season. Bowens, who only played for the Dolphins, started 155 regular season games and 10 playoff contests while with Miami and he had a stretch of 104 consecutive games played during his stint with the team.
Bowens had 414 tackles, 22 sacks, an interception, seven forced fumbles, and five fumble recoveries over the course of his career.
Earlier this week, Rams coach Sean McVay tried to downplay the sentence added to the rule book regarding “cheat motion.” On Saturday, Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel most definitely did not downplay it.
“To execute in the game of football, I would say it’s a priority to know the rules,” McDaniel told when asked by reporters about the new sentence regarding abrupt or forward pre-snap motion. “Fortunately, we have NFL officials here at practice. Currently — they were here yesterday, they’ll be here today. And we also have a little a cheat code, if you will, a member of the competition committee [G.M. Chris Grier] resides in an office that shares a wall with me. So [we’re] very, very proactive in knowing exactly what the rules are and anything that we do, we’re either adjusting or catering to any sort of rule emphasis and we’re going to try to keep it that way.”
He was asked whether the new sentence is not a rule change but an effort to emphasize the existing rules.
“I think you read it as it reads,” McDaniel said. “The emphasis is clearly stated. If you interpret that as exclusively timing motions, you better not simulate the snap counter. You’d better not move forward. And our motions will have to be legal for them to work unless we just want to run minus-five-yard plays, so I think we’re fine with that. We’ll always cater to the rules and I think to simulate the snap is illegal and we should not do that.”
Here’s the new sentence from the 2024 rule book: “Any eligible backfield player who changes his stance does not have to come to a complete stop prior to the snap, as long as his actions are not abrupt (false start) or forward (illegal motion).”
“Cheat motion” is effective in large part because the movements are often abrupt and players routinely start moving forward just before the snap. Joe Rose of WQAM in Miami, who works on radio call of Dolphins games, said Friday that other teams (including the Patriots and former head coach Bill Belichick) complained about Dolphins players moving forward before the snap.
While the rules aren’t changing, the teams that use “cheat motion” (mainly, the Rams, Dolphins, and 49ers) are on notice. Also on notice are officials, who’ll have to spot the player moving forward just before the snap and send a signal from brain to hand to pull the flag while also sending a signal from brain to mouth to blow the whistle and kill a play that has already started — with linemen colliding at full speed.
If officials fail to call it, it will keep happening. And teams will keep doing it. And other teams will complain about it. Just like last year.
Which is why it’s actually smart for coaches who use it to downplay it. Unless and until the officials are willing and able to consistently call it, the teams that have perfected it should keep doing it.
Tyreek Hill recently said that the day quarterback Tua Tagovailoa received his extension was “the best feeling ever.”
Perhaps Saturday’s news will come close.
Hill has agreed to a restructured deal with the Dolphins that will pay him $90 million over the next three seasons with $65 million guaranteed.
While Hill did not have any new years added to his contract, his four-year total of fully guaranteed money is now $106.5 million.
Hill’s deal was previously set to pay him at total of $87.6 million, with $19.665 million in 2024, $22.935 million in 2025, and $45 million in 2026. The final year of the deal was not guaranteed and not likely to paid, given its magnitude.
Hill, who was recently named No. 1 on the NFL’s annual top 100 list, led the league with 1,799 yards and 13 touchdowns while playing just 16 games last season. He was a first-team All-Pro for the fifth time, his fourth as a receiver.
In 2022, his first year with Miami, Hill caught 119 passes for 1,710 yards with seven touchdowns.
Now in the last few months, the Dolphins have signed three of their most important offensive players to new contracts: Hill, Tagovailoa, and receiver Jaylen Waddle.
The Dolphins have signed free agent offensive lineman Sean Harlow, the team announced Saturday.
Miami waived offensive lineman Ireland Brown in a corresponding move.
Harlow has appeared in 41 career games with eight starts, five at left guard and three at center. He spent time with the Giants and Cowboys last season after playing two seasons with the Cardinals (2021-22) and four with the Falcons (2017-20).
He was on Indianapolis’ practice squad in 2018.
Harlow entered the NFL as a fourth-round pick of the Falcons in 2017 after playing collegiately at Oregon State.
Brown signed with the Dolphins as an undrafted free agent on May 4. He played four seasons with Rutgers, where he appeared in 33 games, after transferring from Boston College.
For the first time ever, the No. 1 player in the NFL — as voted on by the players of the NFL — is a receiver.
The top dog is Dolphins wideout Tyreek Hill.
Ordinarily, we don’t care about this list. The methodology is flawed. There’s little or no transparency. An unspecified number of players are asked to list the top 20 players in the league during the prior season. The outcome will be influenced by the specific timing of the voting.
Indeed, in specific stretches of the 2023 regular season (when Hill was on pace for more than 2,000 receiving yards and the Chiefs’ offense was so-so at best), he would have been the top choice for many players. By the time the dust settled on the season, however, it was clear that the best player in the league is Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. (Mahomes finished fourth, behind Hill, Lamar Jackson, and Christian McCaffrey.)
Regardless, it’s Hill. And that makes things even more interesting regarding his current contract. He’s due to make less than $20 million in 2024. Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s recent deal has a new-money annual average of $53.1 million. (Tua came in at 36th on the top-100 list.)
Even though it should have been Mahomes, the list shows that Hill is widely regarded as a better and more impactful player than his quarterback. That will make Hill believe even more strongly that he deserves a new deal.
The challenge for Hill is to not agitate too loudly for a raise. He’s sensitive to the possibility that he’ll be perceived as a problem. That he could be traded again.
Still, he’s more valuable to the Dolphins than the team’s quarterback. But Tua has the huge contract, and Hill’s compensation is slipping and sliding in comparison to other top receivers.
Even if Hill says all the right things publicly, chances are he’s creeping toward a full boil privately.
Dolphins running back Raheem Mostert has been around for a long time. In 2023, his ninth NFL season, he rushed for more than 1,000 yards for the first time, with 21 total touchdowns.
It was enough to land Mostert at No. 60 on the oh-they-still-do-that? NFL Network list of the top 100 players in the league.
“I was a little distraught because I thought I was going to be a little lower, but honestly it just gives me more motivation to work even harder,” Mostert told reporters on Friday regarding his placement on the list. “I did what I did last year, but now its time to move on. It’s year 2024 and I got bigger and better things that I want to get accomplished, and also, I want to help this team as much as I possibly can because it’s going to be nice to have a championship down here in South Florida.”
First, they have to win a playoff game. That’s something the Dolphins haven’t done in 24 years.
“I’m always going to be underrated, no matter what,” Mostert added. “I’m an underrated, under the radar type of guy, that’s fine with me. When I do the things that I do and compete and show people that I’m worth something, I’m worth a damn, then that’s when all the haters, they’re usually quiet. I like that, I feed off of that type of stuff and I don’t listen to what everybody else has to say. I’m just going to go out here, help this team win and I’m going to do what I have to do.”
He did it well last year. He’ll have plenty of competition this year, both around the league and on his own team. We’ll see how much the 32-year-old tailback still has in the tank.
It’s been a week since quarterback Tua Tagovailoa agreed to his major contract extension with the Dolphins, keeping him tied to the team with an average annual value of $53.1 million on his new deal.
In an interview with SiriusXM NFL Radio, receiver Tyreek Hill noted he was ecstatic for his QB because of the adversity he faced in his first couple of seasons — including some pointed criticism from inside the Dolphins’ building.
“Hearing his story about the different coaches that he went through and just everything that he had to hear and stuff like that, it builds up to just now of seeing him sign that big deal. Like, it was amazing. It was the best feeling ever. I feel like I signed the mother fucking deal,” Hill said. “I was like, ‘Bro, congrats to you and your family.’ ‘Cause it was a lot of people that said they didn’t want you here in this building. But here you are finna’ sign this big-ass contract here in Miami, man. So it was the best thing ever.”
Hill said when he saw reporting of the deal emerge on social media, he wanted to stop the meeting he was in to go congratulate Tagovailoa. But then he couldn’t quite do that — Tagovailoa was a little busy putting pen to paper.
“So it was great,” Hill said with a laugh. “It was the best day ever for me, though, because that’s my dawg, man. That’s my boy. I want to see all my boys eat, man. So, I love it.”
With Tagovailoa as his quarterback, Hill led the league with 1,799 yards and 13 receiving touchdowns in 2023.