Kyle Crabbs' Final Miami Dolphins-Specific 2024 NFL Draft Board

How do the prospects of the 2024 NFL Draft rank for the Miami Dolphins? Kyle Crabbs has graded 200 prospects for Miami's scheme and here's how he stacks them.

Congratulations! The wait is finally over! You’ve reached the week of the 2024 NFL Draft — the annual event that feels like the Super Bowl for all 32 fanbases across the league. This year’s NFL Draft feels especially exciting for Dolphins fans for a number of reasons:

First and foremost, it has been a minute since the Dolphins have held a 1st-round draft choice. That isn’t to say that WR Tyreek Hill and EDGE Bradley Chubb weren’t welcomed additions to Miami’s ranks; they certainly have made their impact felt since arriving in South Florida. But a 1st-round pick has an aura about it. So much so that head coach Mike McDaniel is allegedly giddy on the daily, bursting into general manager Chris Grier’s office to advocate for a new player every day.

Second, the Dolphins (or more specifically, the fanbase) are in need of a jolt. The end of a promising 2023 campaign has clearly left a sour taste in a lot of mouths — from the collapse against Tennessee, which ultimately cost the Dolphins the AFC East crown, to the blowout loss to Baltimore or the frigid finale against the eventual Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs.

Seeing one of the faces of the franchise, Christian Wilkins, leave for Las Vegas just two months later was another sour note for 2024. It’s high time that Miami lands a “win”.

The 2024 NFL Draft could be exactly that.

But for us to feel a “win” for the Dolphins, we need to know who the best talents are on the board. And that is where we bring in the 2024 Miami Dolphins-Specific NFL Draft Board. If I were in the Dolphins’ draft room as a one-man scouting department (I’m not!), this is what my rankings would look like and how I would go about targeting the players at the end of the week.

A few disclaimers, if you will:

• THIS IS NOT A SUREFIRE, ALL-ENCOMPASSING LIST!

  • The months of January and February were committed to 8 weeks of scouring NFL free agents on film and grading them for Miami’s schemes. These efforts yielded the 2024 Miami Dolphins Free Agency Board.

  • As a result, the heavy focus on 2024 NFL Draft prospects started approximately 10 weeks ago. Thorough scouting of prospects allowed me to finish around 3 players a day, every day, for those 10 weeks. There are ample Day 3 prospects not represented here, although I did attempt to focus on the consensus top-200 players for the majority of my scouting effort.

I have prepared three separate ways for you to consume the rankings within. There is a vertical draft board, position-by-position breakdowns, and a horizontal draft board. The latter two not only illustrate the 2024 NFL Draft prospects available but also showcase where Miami’s current under-contract talent ranks. The objective with the presentation of this information is to further provide depth into the opportunity cost of each decision Miami makes on a player and how many upgrade opportunities are present in the draft at any particular role on the roster.

But first things first. Let’s meet the players of the 2024 NFL Draft.

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The 2024 Vertical Draft Board

Allow this to be your starting point. Players were graded on 10 position-specific and scheme-tailored traits; the objective being to project those players into the anticipated schemes of the 2024 Miami Dolphins on offense and defense.

The 200 players I have ranked here are bucketed into categories in accordance with how strong of a fit they would be for the Dolphins and how notable their talent level would impact within the scheme.

A few notes here:

• I did not make any player adjustments for outstanding player issues such as character questions, off-field concerns, or injury backgrounds. The objective of this board is not to create an accurate roadmap of who gets drafted when. It is to subjectively express when players would be a plus or minus value addition dependent on Miami’s scheduled draft picks.

• Players with significant reported character concerns are, however, designated with a (C) next to their name. Players with significant medical histories that may fail them from a team board are noted with an (M). These players are, in real life, more likely to slide in the draft to later stages versus the valuation here.

This is the traditional “draftnik” presentation of NFL Draft information. But I would also argue that the tiers are more significant than the actual grade when it comes to draft-day decisions. We’ll see more of that visualization on the horizontal board.

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The 2024 Horizontal Team Board

This is the big kahuna. While the sports media representation of prospect value has traditionally skewed towards a 1 through whatever number list, this is a more reflective way of NFL franchises and how they set their draft boards to make decisions.

Columns are committed to positions, while descending rows illustrate descending grades. The chart reads both left to right and top to bottom.

COLOR KEY:

Navy Blue: Top-10 Grade
Blue: 1st Round Grade
Dark Green: Late 1st/Early 2nd Round Grade
Green: 2nd Round Grade
Yellow: 3rd Round Grade
Orange: 4th Round Grade
Red: 5th Round Grade
Dark Red: 6th Round Grade
Gray: 7th Round Grade

You can download a PDF version of the horizontal board for your own reference on draft week below: