Former Dallas Cowboys first-round pick Mazi Smith is back on the market after the Miami Dolphins released him on Tuesday, another rough stop for a player who still hasn’t found a real foothold in the NFL.
Smith, drafted by Dallas out of Michigan in 2023, spent part of his time with Miami on the practice squad and showed up in only one game for the Dolphins. He didn’t record a tackle there, continuing a stretch that has followed him since he left the Cowboys.
Dallas held onto Smith for two and a half years before trading him to the New York Jets last season as part of the Quinnen Williams deal. His time in New York was brief and quiet: three games, no tackles. The Jets moved on before the 2026 season, and Smith landed in Miami, where the result was the same.
Since leaving Dallas, Smith has played in just four games, logged 69 total snaps and still has not made a tackle. For a former first-rounder once viewed as a possible answer at nose tackle, it’s been a steep and surprising drop.
That’s the part that stings for Dallas, too, because Smith was supposed to fill a very specific need when the Cowboys took him at No. 26 overall in 2023. At the time, the roster had playmakers like Micah Parsons and Osa Odighizzuwa creating pressure, but it lacked the kind of interior presence that could handle the dirty work against the run.
At 6-foot-3 and 337 pounds, Smith looked like the obvious candidate to do it. Instead, he never settled into a consistent role.
Dan Quinn used him in a penetrating 3-tech role, trying to tap into Smith’s speed and athleticism. When Mike Zimmer took over, Smith shifted back to the 1-tech, and there was real hope that the move would let him focus on run defense.
But that change didn’t unlock him either. If anything, it exposed the same problem: Smith wasn’t consistently winning with power and was often getting pushed off the line of scrimmage.
Now he’s searching for his fourth NFL team.
And in Dallas, the run defense questions haven’t exactly gone away. Even with Williams, Kenny Clark and Otito Ogbonnia on the depth chart, the Cowboys are still working to solve that problem.
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