Jordyn Brooks is the captain now
“We become a team? The sky’s the limit." The Miami Dolphins have been anything but that. It was bad. Now? Jordyn Brooks is the man in change and he views this moment as his football destiny.
Our 2026 NFL Season Preview Features continue. Go Long sits down with the man who plans on being the alpha these Miami Dolphins have been sorely missing for years. One Texas Tech awakening. One brother lost. Chilling phone calls from Texas. Tearing his ACL in Seattle. More issues in Miami than anyone knew. (We chat with players on what went wrong.)
All of it has led Brooks to the captain’s seat as the voice this organization needs.
He thinks these Dolphins are going to surprise people, too.
Thanks, all.
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — He can still picture immortals from the 1960s clashing in slow motion, still hear the crescendo of trumpets, cymbals and clarinets blend into John Facenda’s dramatic narration and still remember the visceral feeling it gave him deep inside. It was art. It was addicting. He didn’t have cable. Following modern pro football was not an option. But his father did own a box of NFL Films tapes and Jordyn Brooks could not get enough.
Whenever he stayed at a friend’s house, he’d ask to watch NFL Network in hopes of catching flashbacks to yesteryear. Jim Brown, Walter Payton, Barry Sanders. His eyes were glued to the running backs most. YouTube went mainstream around the time he was 8 years old. Any access to the Internet meant chasing down every rabbit hole imaginable to learn everything he could about the NFL’s roots in the 60s. Then, the 70s. Then, the 80s. He learned about the sport in chronological order. His appreciation for the sport was pure.
At home, he’d steal all pillows from all bedrooms to set up an imaginary offense and run plays. Siblings were pissed he was blocking the TV. He’d bash into furniture. Something inevitably broke. He only knew one speed because — in his mind — these weren’t pillows. These were players. “And sometimes,” Brooks adds, “you’ve got to have an imagination if you really have a vision of where you want to go in life.” Into youth football, as a running back for the Pleasant Grove Falcons in Dallas, scintillating NFL Films tracks like “Round Up” and “Ramblin’ Man from Gramblin’” played in his head TD to TD to TD. Into high school, his coach believed the best players should play defense. Brooks was moved to linebacker. Brooks loathed the decision. And out of sheer anger, he teed off on everything that moved. Pop to pop to pulverizing pop, he grew to realize this was a calling.
He was always more Butkus and Nitschke and Lambert on those tapes.
Far back as he remembers, nothing mattered more to him.
“God put the desire in me,” Brooks says. “The love was implanted into me with how obsessed I was with football.”
So, imagine his anger. Imagine what’s running through his mind when he’s witnessing the exact opposite as a starting linebacker for the underachieving Miami Dolphins. He gets it. Anything you want, you can get in Miami. Beaches, nightclubs, girls. Temptation is ubiquitous. All who play football do not necessarily love football. Loss to loss, many peers appeared wholly unfazed.
Here inside an office at Dolphins HQ, his dark eyebrows scowl. Brooks is wearing a cutoff Jordan Brand hoodie with a hat that reads Greatness is a Process. He swivels in his chair as he speaks.
“Look, we play football,” Brooks says. “We are not going to be able to run and hit forever. You’ve got a short window and then your body’s going to fade out. It happens to everybody. Nobody’s supposed to be running full speed into each other. But we do that. So you can only do that for a number of years, and then you can’t. So the urgency should be: ‘I’ve got to maximize this while I can.’”
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Football is the ultimate team sport. The player next to you quite literally must do his job for you to do yours. Tom Brady isn’t Tom Brady, he explains, if linemen don’t block and receivers can’t catch. All 11 players are intertwined. One imbecile, any given play, can lose a game. Apathy — in this profession — costs co-workers their jobs, their knee ligaments, their pride. Quit like so many of his teammates were quitting and you’re directly screwing with livelihoods. That’s where it became “personal” to Brooks the last two seasons. He confronted teammates. First, nicely. You’ve got it in you. I’ve seen you do it at this level. Sometimes, that’s all a player needs. Other times, sure, he’d get mean because he wants others to do the same to him.
Urgency. Accountability. Hunger. All of this must become contagious in a locker room.
“We haven’t been able to do that,” Brooks says, “because people don’t care.”
What’s old must be burnt to soot. A franchise that’s now gone 25 seasons without a playoff win cleaned house to historic proportions this offseason. The GM (Chris Grier), head coach (Mike McDaniel) and quarterback (Tua Tagovailoa) were all canned. Miami’s new regime will eat $179,214,254 in dead money this season. In other words, 60 percent of this team’s salary cap is allotted to players who won’t play a down. All of which is healthy addition by subtraction. Sources inside the mickey mouse operation tell Go Long exactly what this looked like, right down to highly-paid vets thumbing through their cell phone during walkthroughs. Reset button? The 2026 Dolphins, under new GM Jon-Eric Sullivan, are correctly spiking the nuclear football.
What’s new runs deeper than a flashy free agent signing, a jaw-dropping trade.
This organization needs a soul. It needs a 29-year-old with the wisdom, scars, talent and, above all, maniacal urgency sorely lacking at 347 Don Shula Drive: Jordyn Brooks.
His life is a guide. Long before asserting himself as one of the NFL’s best linebackers, he was lost. In college, drowning in alcohol, one wake-up call changed the trajectory of his life. In the pros, consumed with the self-pity, another awakening saved him. He’s a realist. Miami has the youngest roster in the NFL at an average age of 25 years old. There are no big names on the marquee.
Unsolicited, Brooks brings up exactly what readers are thinking.
“A lot of people on the outside are going to look at our team and be like, ‘Yeah, 0-17,’” Brooks says. “But me? When you’re in it, it’s different. You never have that mindset. I understand why people would say the things they say. ‘How many stars do they have? Proven guys?’ We ain’t got a lot of them. But we tried that and it didn’t work. To me, this is exactly what we need. Whatever the vision is, I’m all-in. The best teams win. Not the best players.”
He brings up Sullivan’s old team. The 2023 Green Bay Packers had the youngest team in the NFL and came within one drive of reaching the NFC Championship Game. There’s a fire in his eyes.
“Why couldn’t that be the same situation here?” Brooks asks.