Miami is expected to open the 2026 season with a different kind of offense for Malik Willis, one that leans more on read-option plays and designed quarterback runs in Week 1 against the Las Vegas Raiders. That is a real shift for a team entering a reset year with a new front office, new coaching staff, new quarterback, much of a new roster and a new team president.
The reason people are watching now is simple: Week 1 brings the first chance to see how Bobby Slowik shapes the Dolphins around Willis. The offense is expected to be more controlled than explosive, with less emphasis on speed, mismatches and layered pre-snap motion packages, even if motion still remains part of the plan. In this version of the offense, motion is meant to help diagnose the defense, not to create confusion or force the offense to race to the line.
That still leaves room for the parts that fit Willis best. He can push the ball deeper than Tua Tagovailoa was able to in the last two years, and his arm strength gives Miami a different answer when the defense backs off. His legs matter too. The expectation is not that Miami becomes a run-first team, but that Willis can widen the playbook enough to make the Raiders prepare for more than a standard pocket passer. If that sounds familiar, it is because Miami is trying to stitch together a Shanahan-style West Coast offense with some of Mike McDaniel’s old rhythm-passing ideas while making the fit work for a different quarterback.
The preseason offered only one series for the starters, and joint practices focused on pocket passing and building chemistry rather than turning Willis loose on scrambles. That makes the Week 1 plan harder to read and, in some ways, more interesting. Miami is being described as a rebuilding team, yet that same label can make it dangerous; Kevin Nogle said a competitive showing alone would count as a win, and he also called Miami everyone’s trap game this season. Those two ideas can sit together because the roster is young, the expectations are low and the team still has enough unknowns to make opponents uneasy.
Jordyn Brooks put that edge in plain language last week. He said the team does not have a choice, that nobody is picking the Dolphins to win anything, and that opponents do not respect them. Brooks said Miami has a 100% underdog mindset and will carry an “us against the world” mentality into the season. That is the backdrop for the opener, and it is why the Week 1 game matters beyond the box score: Miami is trying to show that a reset year can still produce a team that is hard to play against, even if success is measured by whether it looks better in Week 18 than it does on Sunday.
The next thing to watch is how much of the offense is built around Willis’s running ability when the Miami Dolphins and the Las Vegas Raiders finally line up in Week 1. If the quarterback runs show up early, the plan is clearer than it was in August. If they do not, the Dolphins may be saving the part of the offense that tells the most about what kind of team this really is.
