What Miami Dolphins four-time Pro Bowl cornerback Xavien Howard warned might happen this offseason is indeed happening.
The Dolphins plan to release Howard at the start of the new league year and have informed him as such, according to a league source Friday.
The decision follows earlier Friday news that the Dolphins are also cutting edge defender Emmanuel Ogbah, as the team begins its concerted effort to add cap space this offseason.
Howard will be released with a post-June 1 designation, same as fellow cornerback Byron Jones last offseason. The Dolphins get $18.5 million in cap savings from the move, with $7.4 million in dead money, but those funds will not be available to use until June. That means Miami cannot use the $18.5 million in the initial waves of free agency, beginning in mid-March.
Cutting Howard pre-June wouldn’t have been smart. The way his contract is structured, it would’ve resulted in just $2.8 million in savings and $23.1 million in dead cap.
The release of Ogbah, which is not under the same post-June 1 restrictions, saves the Dolphins $13.7 million in cap space.
The Dolphins need to get under the league’s salary cap before the start of the league year March 13, meaning the savings from the Howard cut don’t go toward that. With the league’s Friday announcement that the 2024 salary cap will be $255.4 million, Miami is in the neighborhood of $26 million over the cap after cutting Ogbah. The Dolphins can easily reach the number with a variety of moves, including restructuring high-priced contracts, converting base salary into prorated bonuses that go against future seasons’ cap space to spread out the financial burden.
Howard, a 2016 second-round pick of the Dolphins, will end his run in Miami after eight seasons. He has been a staple of Dolphins defenses under three different head coaches and five defensive coordinators.
Turning 31 July 4, he hits the open market.
“(Howard) makes every team in the National Football League an instant contender,” Howard’s agent, David Canter, wrote in a social media statement. “Lockdown corners don’t hit the market often.”
Howard’s 29 career interceptions are tied for fourth in Dolphins history and are most in the NFL since 2017. He also had an interception in each of the two playoff games he played with Miami, and his 95 career passes defensed are second in team history to Sam Madison’s 104, since the stat began being tracked in 1991.
Once a cornerback who collected 10 interceptions in 2020 and seven in 2018, both which led the league those seasons, Howard picked off just one pass each of the past two regular seasons after signing a lucrative contract extension in the 2022 offseason.
He was set to count for a $25.9 million cap hit in 2024 before the release but did not have his salary guaranteed.
Howard’s 2023 season ended in the Dec. 31 loss to the Baltimore Ravens that saw him go down to a foot injury. It cost him the regular-season finale the following week and Miami’s playoff loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in the wild-card round.
Howard was previously the Dolphins’ longest-active-tenured player on the roster, a distinction that now belongs to linebacker Jerome Baker, tight end Durham Smythe and kicker Jason Sanders, members of ex-coach Adam Gase’s 2018 draft class. Baker, a third-round pick, was selected a day and round earlier than Smythe, while Sanders was a seventh-round selection that year.
