The Miami Dolphins will be incredibly busy for the next week-plus. They will be spending the next 11 days in the Midwest, and during that time, they will participate in a team practice along with two joint practices and two preseason games. Miami will kick off its preseason slate with a matchup against the Chicago Bears on Aug. 10 and play the Detroit Lions less than one week later on Aug. 16.
Dolphins star signal-caller Tua Tagovailoa seems to view the trip as an opportunity for the team to build camaraderie ahead of the start of the 2025 campaign. Tagovailoa said that players and coaches on the team are scheduled to spend plenty of quality time with each other throughout the trip.
“We’ve got some things lined up with our rookies and then lined up with the veterans and the rookies and our coaches to go out there and find some time to spend with each,” Tagovailoa said. “Whether that’s eating, whether that’s going and seeing a movie, whatever that looks like.”
Linebacker Jaelan Phillips — who has been limited to just 12 games played in the last two seasons combined thanks to injuries — seems to be excited for the chance to further bond with his teammates.
“Cool team bonding,” Phillips said. “We’re going on an 11-night road trip, so we’re going to be in the hotel with each other every single day. So I think it’s a great thing for a lot of reasons.”
After the Dolphins play their opening two preseason contests on the road, they will play their third and final game before the beginning of the coming season at home. Miami will wrap up its preseason schedule when it takes on the Jacksonville Jaguars on Aug. 23 at Hard Rock Stadium.
The number of wins or losses the Dolphins end the preseason with doesn’t matter all that much. But the preseason can provide valuable reps for someone like Phillips, who hasn’t played in an NFL game in a while. He got injured in one of Miami’s first games of the 2024 season, as he went down with a partially torn ACL in the team’s loss to the Tennessee Titans back in September and sat out the remainder of the campaign.
For Tagovailoa, he will look to carry over his precise passing from training camp into the team’s preseason bouts. Through Miami’s opening seven training camp practices, he didn’t so much as throw a single interception. That was a notable development for a quarterback who has had trouble taking care of the ball at times in his NFL career and threw 14 interceptions in the 2023 season alone.
