What Does The Miami Dolphins’ Strength of Schedule for the 2026 Season Look Like?

What Does The Miami Dolphins’ Strength of Schedule for the 2026 Season Look Like?

The Miami Dolphins are in for a brutally challenging slate of games in the 2026 NFL season, according to one statistician. Warren Sharp used his very own formula to determine the strength of schedule for every one of the league’s 32 teams, and he has Miami’s schedule ranked as the second-most challenging in football, behind only another bottom-feeder team in the Arizona Cardinals.

All it takes is a quick gander at the Dolphins’ upcoming opponents to understand why their 17-game odyssey will be a particularly unforgiving one. First off, three of the team’s regular-season contests — over 15 percent of the team’s total regular-season schedule — will come against the two teams that met in the AFC Championship Game.

The reigning AFC Champion New England Patriots are still headed by an elite coach-quarterback combo with Drake Maye and Mike Vrabel, while the Broncos — who are on the heels of a 14-win season — have a new-and-improved receiver corps with Jaylen Waddle now in the fold.

Beyond the fact that Miami will butt heads with the conference’s top contenders from last season quite often, the lion’s share of the teams on its schedule finished with above-.500 records in 2025 — nine of the 14 squads, to be exact.

And a lot of the teams that missed the cut-off (the Cincinnati Bengals and Kansas City Chiefs, just to name a few) arguably did more so because of injuries than any other factor. Superstar quarterbacks Joe Burrow and Patrick Mahomes were both plagued by the injury bug a season ago.

Mahomes tore both ACL and LCL versus the Los Angeles Chargers late in the campaign. As for Burrow, a turf toe injury limited him to just eight starts, though Cincinnati posted a 5-3 record with him as a starter.

If Dolphins fans should take anything away from Sharp’s strength-of-schedule rankings, it’s that their team won’t really have any days off next season.