The Miami Dolphins spent Friday morning watching Malik Willis put together his best practice of training camp, and they spent Friday afternoon making the plan behind him considerably thinner.
Hours after the session wrapped at the Baptist Health Training Complex, the team waived rookie quarterback Mark Gronowski, ending the undrafted Iowa product’s Miami run after eight camp practices.
The move arrived packaged with a pair of defensive additions. The Dolphins signed safety Tanner Wall and claimed cornerback Ahmari Harvey off waivers from the Pittsburgh Steelers, while safety Omar Brown was waived with an injury designation to help clear the room.
The quarterback math is now simple, because Willis, Quinn Ewers and Cam Miller are the only three passers left on the 80-man roster heading into Saturday’s open practice at Hard Rock Stadium.
College football’s winningest quarterback couldn’t stick
Gronowski arrived in May with one of the most decorated resumes in the 2026 undrafted class. Across four seasons at South Dakota State and a final year at Iowa, he piled up 58 victories as a starter, the most by any quarterback in NCAA history, and won two FCS national championships with the Jackrabbits along with the 2023 Walter Payton Award as the top player in the subdivision.
His lone Big Ten season produced 16 rushing touchdowns, which led the conference, on a 63.4 percent completion rate. The production never carried over to Miami Gardens, where fourth-string reps were always going to be scarce in a camp built around installing a new offense.
His final full practice told the story: in Thursday’s session, the team’s official camp notebook logged two interceptions by the defense, and Gronowski threw both of them — a tipped ball that linebacker Willie Gay Jr. hauled in deep along the sideline and a second pick by rookie safety Louis Moore late in the day.
Gronowski was decribed as a “struggling” quarterback, a blunt label for a player the Dolphins had targeted in the pre-draft process and signed within days of the draft’s conclusion. The developmental snaps he was absorbing will now flow to the three quarterbacks Jeff Hafley actually plans to use this preseason.
Willis picked the same day to peak
The other half of Friday’s story belongs to the man the entire operation is built around. Willis delivered his best Dolphins practice to date, headlined by a deep connection to rookie wideout Caleb Douglas that the team’s social account turned into its highlight of the day.
Omar Kelly later joked that a completion the beat corps initially logged at 30 yards deserved to be stretched to 35 on review, which is the kind of problem Miami will happily take. The day was not spotless for the position group as a whole, as there were four interceptions among the quarterbacks while judging two of them the product of tips and deflections rather than bad decisions.
That nuance matters for a receiver room still finding its hands, but it did not dent the larger trajectory. That trajectory has swung hard in a week. Willis opened camp with a rocky first public showing that put him under early fire, and an NFL executive survey published days later ranked him behind Tua Tagovailoa, the quarterback Miami cut to sign him.
The response since has been steady, from the Day 3 session where his legs carried the practice to Friday’s throwing clinic, and Kelly has said on South Florida radio that Willis’s development has been one of his biggest surprises of camp. The stakes attached to that swing are enormous.
Willis signed a three-year, $67.5 million contract with $45 million guaranteed in March, on the strength of three Green Bay starts in which he completed 79 percent of his passes for 972 yards with six touchdowns and no interceptions. Miami paid for a projection, and days like Friday are the first evidence the projection might hold.
Friday’s other moves point at the secondary
The additions on the other side of the ball deserve attention too. Harvey, claimed from Pittsburgh, gives Hafley another young corner to evaluate behind a position group that has dealt with early camp absences, and Wall restores safety depth the roster lost when Omar Brown went out with the injury designation.
The churn is unlikely to stop there. The Dolphins also tried out five tight ends on Friday — Baylor Cupp, Zach Davidson, Brandon Frazier, Tre’ McKitty and Jermaine Terry — a strong signal the front office is still shopping at the bottom of the roster two weeks before cuts get serious.
What comes next
The immediate calendar works in the fans’ favor, because the Dolphins take Saturday’s practice to Hard Rock Stadium and no ticket is required to attend. From there the runway shortens quickly toward the preseason opener on Aug. 22, where a three-man quarterback room means Ewers and Miller are in line for heavy work behind whatever snaps Willis takes.
Gronowski’s story in Miami may not be finished either. If he clears waivers, he would be eligible to return on the practice squad after final cuts, a common landing spot for developmental quarterbacks with his kind of college pedigree.
For now, though, Friday drew the line under the competition portion of this camp, and everything about the day — the cut, the claims, the highlight reel — pointed at the same conclusion: This offense belongs to Malik Willis, and for the first time all summer, he spent a full practice looking like he intends to keep it.
