Justin Joly caught the football, turned upfield, and by the time he crossed the goal line had authored the best highlight of the Denver Broncos’ entire preseason; two days later, the Broncos threw it away like a piece of junk mail. Denver had traded up — surrendering picks 170 and 182 — to take the NC State tight end 152nd overall back in April, watched him produce an 88-yard touchdown against the Vikings in the preseason finale, and waived him at final roster cuts two days later anyway. The Miami Dolphins, who at least seem capable of reading a box score, picked him up off the sidewalk before Denver could even stash him on the practice squad. It is, as of this week, the highest-drafted rookie any team has cut at final roster cuts across the entire NFL this year.
The play itself deserves a second look, since the people who drafted Joly apparently gave it only one. Against Minnesota on August 28, with Sam Ehlinger at quarterback, Joly took a short pass and turned it into 88 yards and a touchdown, finishing the night with two catches for 95 yards after lining up at multiple positions. NFL.com’s Chad Reuter noted he “smoothly ran down the seam and across the middle” with solid blocking effort, despite run-blocking never being Joly’s college strength. None of it was going to move a depth chart Denver had drawn up months before that tape ever existed.
Then Broncos GM George Paton explained the decision, and the explanation is worth reading twice for how little it actually explains: “Justin is a talented player. We knew it when we drafted him. We knew he was raw.” Sit with that for a second. Denver knew he was raw when it traded up to draft him in April. It knew he was raw when he outran an entire secondary for 88 yards in August. And it knew he was raw, apparently, right up until the moment it kept seventh-round rookie Dallen Bentley over him. The tape didn’t change the verdict because the verdict was never waiting on the tape; the depth chart got decided long before Joly ever touched the ball in a Broncos uniform, and the touchdown was just the last thing that happened before the paperwork caught up to a decision that predated it.
That is roster evaluation with the spin removed, and it is uglier than the transaction wire made it look. Three players from Denver’s 2026 draft class didn’t make the 53-man roster, but Joly is the one people are still talking about, because the numbers behind his release don’t square with the numbers he put on tape. Sean Payton signed off on the roster; whatever the tight end room looked like on his depth chart, an 88-yard touchdown wasn’t enough to move a name up it.
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Miami didn’t need convincing.
The Dolphins claimed Joly as one of a league-high seven waiver claims made under new GM Jon-Eric Sullivan and head coach Jeff Hafley, a front office apparently willing to bet that a fifth-round rookie who authored the best highlight of Denver’s August is worth a roster spot other teams were giving away for free. Roster decisions like this one rarely get graded in real time, but Denver made this one easy to grade: it is now the highest-drafted Broncos rookie to be waived at final cuts since 2005, when the team spent a third-round pick on Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett, who never played a single down in the NFL. Clarett was a cautionary tale about talent evaluation gone catastrophically wrong before he ever suited up. Joly is the inverse version of that story — a player who showed exactly what he could do, on tape, in real time, and still got cut, because the organization had stopped watching before the tape ever existed.
For the rest of the roster-cut fallout around the league this week, plenty of front offices made similarly cold personnel calls and called it strategy. Denver’s version just happens to have an 88-yard touchdown attached to it, which makes the arithmetic harder to hide.
