The Backfield Depth Chart Is Now a Question Miami Never Planned to Answer
Look at the running back depth chart and work backward. DJ Herman leads it. Carlos Washington is second. Jarquez Hunter — acquired in late August specifically to be the insurance policy behind De'Von Achane — is third. That is the backfield Daniel Sillman is now asking to carry a season the entire offseason was architected around a different player entirely.
When I wrote last week about Achane's injury breaking the math, the argument was about production replacement. The deeper problem is structural. Achane didn't just lead Miami's rushing attack in 2025 — he *was* Miami's passing game extension out of the backfield, catching 67 of 85 targets for 488 yards and four touchdowns on top of 1,350 rushing yards. That dual-threat volume doesn't just disappear into a committee; it disappears, period. No back currently on Miami's roster has demonstrated that kind of receiving role at any level of meaningful NFL exposure this season.
The Hunter acquisition was supposed to solve a different equation. When Miami traded Tutu Atwell to the Rams for Hunter in late August, the logic was straightforward: deepen the backfield behind a healthy Achane, accept the receiver room thinning as the cost of doing business. That trade made sense as a depth move. It makes considerably less sense as the foundation of your entire ground game. Hunter is now third on the depth chart behind two players whose combined 2025 production — Ollie Gordon II's 199 rushing yards and three touchdowns — was built in a complementary role, not a featured one.
What the numbers from 2025 actually reveal is how completely Miami concentrated its offensive identity. Malik Washington contributed in the backfield and as a receiver, but his rushing total was modest and his receiving work was spread across 17 games in a secondary capacity. Tua Tagovailoa threw for 2,660 yards and 20 touchdowns, but also posted 15 interceptions in just 14 games — a turnover rate that the offense could survive when Achane was generating chunk plays on the ground and forcing defenses into conflict. Without that conflict, opposing defenses can pin their ears back against a passing game that has already demonstrated it turns the ball over at a costly clip.
My read is that the offseason's core mistake wasn't acquiring Hunter — it was treating Hunter's arrival as backfield depth solved, rather than recognizing that behind Achane there was essentially no one with the receiving profile that made Miami's offense structurally coherent. The Atwell trade cost Miami receiver depth at a position already thin enough that Caleb Douglas and Chris Bell were starting Week 1. Now the receiver room is navigating its own injury questions — Douglas listed as questionable, Bell questionable — while the backfield committee scrambles to replace a player who was, by any honest accounting, doing two jobs simultaneously. Sillman built an infrastructure reset around a single load-bearing wall. That wall is now on injured reserve, and the blueprints don't show what comes next.