What QB Prospects Could Dolphins Consider?

Head coach Mike McDaniel discussed the possibility of adding a quarterback in the draft, but which one would fit the bill?

Mississippi quarterback Jaxson Dart speaks to the media at the 2025 NFL combine. | Clark Wade/IndyStar / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

INDIANAPOLIS — Cam Ward and Shedeur Sanders attracted most of the attention when quarterbacks prospects spoke to the media at the NFL scouting combine, but neither figure into the equation even if the Miami Dolphins decide to draft a player at that position.

Everybody else might be fair game, to a certain degree, and that includes anyone from Jaxson Dart to Jalen Milroe to Dillon Gabriel and Tyler Shough.

While there's a consensus that Ward and Sanders are the top of the 2025 QB class, opinions among draft analysts vary a lot more when it comes to how the rest of the class stacks up.

All of them are pretty different as prospects, and based on skill set it would seem as though Gabriel might be the best fit, though his lack of ideal size (5-10) no doubt is a major concern.

The most intriguing of the group just might be Shough, who battled injuries in his college career and is old enough to have been teammates with Jevon Holland at Oregon in 2018-19. He also was teammates with Erik Ezukanma at Texas Tech before finishing his seven-year (yes, seven years) college career at Louisville.

"I haven't heard any questions about it thus thus far," Shough said about his age. "So I think I consider it a positive. I think quarterbacks play well, I think, better into their 30s. I think it's kind of shown up time and time again. And, I mean, you see guys like Bo Nix and Michael Penix and Jayden Daniels, who kind of went through some stuff in their college career, and they've had success early on. And I feel like you as time gets going, you only mature and you can get better as a thrower. I think that's just a question mark, and that's really why I wanted to answer coming here was that I only had really two broken bones."

Milroe might have the most intriguing upside of the quarterback prospects not named Ward or Sanders because of his running ability and his strong arm.

He also had a strong 2024 season at Alabama, where he followed Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones and Bryce Young as starting quarterbacks — the last three NFL first-round picks, the first the starting quarterback for the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles.

"Yeah, the program as a whole, came from a lot of great quarterbacks, and we're all different," Milroe said. "We're all unique in our own way. So it's hard to compare us as a whole. We had different teams, we had different players around us, we had a different system. So it's hard to compare, but I do respect each and every one of them, because I know what it is to be a starting quarterback. It's a hard task. It's something that you don't take lightly at all, especially being a captain as well, with those quarterbacks that are there along that great timeline, they were also captains as well. They also had to put their best foot forward. One thing I got to apply Mac Jones with is that he was a 4.0 student. He had a red cap at a graduation, so just the mindset he had in the film room, but also in the classroom as well. And all of them also got their degree. So there's a lot of thing I was implemented to be a starting quarterback at University Alabama, and it's hard to interpret. It's hard to see that, but it's a hard process, for sure. "

WHAT WARD AND SANDERS SAID

When it comes to Sanders and Ward and their combine press conferences, they went exactly as one would expect.

While both are confident, Ward is a lot more reserved in making bold statements, where Sanders, well, is the son of Deion Sanders.

When asked about proving critics wrong with his performance after he moved from Jackson State to Colorado, he replied, "You think I'm worried about what critics say or what people got to say. You know who my dad is? They hated on him too. So it's almost normal. Without people hating, it's not normal for us. So we like the adversity. We like everything that comes with the name. That's why we are who we are."

Sanders and Ward trained together ahead of the combine, but when asked about his training partner, Sanders just said, "I'm here to speak for myself."

Ward explained why he won't be throwing at the combine.

"I just think the files (I think) of film says everything I can do," he said. "I just think me throwing here is not going to move me in no type of way. I just decided to throw at my pro to the best receiving corps in the country."