Often overlooked and discarded, Dolphins’ Raheem Mostert opens up on unusual journey

Long before Raheem Mostert scored an NFL-high six touchdowns during the first 15 days of the season, long before he helped lead this Dolphins offense to an historic start and long before he tied a franchise record with four touchdowns on Sunday against Denver, he stood at a career crossroads on a depressing September day in 2016.

Having just been released for a fourth time in a year, Mostert was looking for just one team — any team — to believe in him, and invest in him, as a running back.

His fiancee was hosting a bridal shower that day when the Cleveland Browns called Mostert and told him his services would no longer be needed.

“If you can only imagine that phone call that I had with her dad, because he was the one that was hosting, helping her event,” Mostert said, telling the story as he stood at his locker last week.

“I’ll never forget: I was sitting on the couch in our apartment and gave him that call. I said: ‘Hey man, ‘look, I don’t know how to tell you this. I don’t even want to tell the ladies, but I just got cut by the Browns.’

“The first thing he said was: ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re going to talk about this when the girls get done with the bridal shower because that would have just ruined their day.’”

When the shower ended, Mostert and his soon-to-be-wife had one of the most important conversations of his life.

“That’s actually the pivotal moment in my career, when I asked my wife on our couch, ‘What should I do?’ Because I had just got cut by several different teams prior, too.

“She asked me, ‘How much do I truly love football?’ I told her, ‘I mean, I’ve played this sport since I was 7.’ She was like, ‘Well, I don’t see what’s stopping you now.’

“At that moment, any thought of me quitting or giving up was just null and void. If I want to be great, I have to go out there and chase my dreams.”

But that wasn’t the end of being doubted.

Before that conversation on the couch, Mostert had been cut by the Eagles, Dolphins, Ravens and Browns.

The Jets signed him to their practice squad two days after the bridal shower but cut him six days after that. The Bears then signed him a day later but released him in November.

So here was Mostert, once again unemployed on Thanksgiving, wondering if a seventh team would give a chance.

That seventh team, San Francisco, eventually became the first team that recognized what he could become: a very good NFL starting running back, and not merely a return specialist.

That decision to pursue his dream has led him to great success, initially with the 49ers, and now with the Dolphins, where has has averaged 5.1 yards per game in 20 games and 17 starts — among the league’s highest rushing averages over that period.

Of the six teams that cut him, not a single one gave him a single rushing attempt before releasing him. (Miami has made up for that in his second go-round here.)

And it took the 49ers a while to do that, too: He received only one rushing attempt in his only game with the 49ers during that 2016 season (the New Year’s Eve season finale), then rushed only six times (for 30 yards) in 2017.

The 49ers gave him 34 carries in 2018 and 137 carries in 2019, a season which included a game for the ages: 29 carries for a franchise postseason record 220 yards and four touchdowns against Green Bay in the NFC Championship.

A second four TD game (three rushing, one receiving) came Sunday in Miami’s 70-20 annihilation of Denver.

Mike McDaniel, who worked with Mostert for five years in San Francisco, encouraged Dolphins management to sign him shortly after McDaniel’s hiring, even though he had missed nearly all of the previous season with significant cartilage damage in his knee.

Six years later, is Mostert still motivated by being cut by six teams?

“That still fuels me to this day,” he said. “I still have that list of the teams that cut me, that didn’t give me an opportunity, including the Dolphins at the time. But all is forgiven. But you just have to look at it as a positive. I did get my opportunity when I was with the Niners and I can’t look back.”

Did he write down the list of teams that dumped him? Mostert motions to his brain and said: “It’s right up there. I think of it every day and that’s to be a gold jacket candidate [for the Pro Football Hall of Fame]. I know that it looks like a long shot, but that still doesn’t stop me from my mentality.”

Without blinking, he then rattles off the teams that cut him, in order, “Philly, Dolphins, Baltimore, Cleveland, following year Cleveland, Jets, Chicago.” (The Browns cut him twice.)

Mostert said that officials from those six teams have expressed some admiration and regret to him in private conversations over the years. He declined to identify anyone who approached him from those teams because “that’s just not what I do. That’s a little petty.

“But I’ve had several people in personnel departments and other teams come up to me if I was playing them that week and truly apologize. They really felt like they made a mistake. All is forgiven, truthfully. But you still have to have that dog mentality. Like, hey, you thought I wasn’t good enough? Well, I’ve got to run for 200 on you today…. I’m not really holding grudges or anything like that. But you still have to keep that in the back of your mind.”

As he reflects on how far he has come, he thinks back to a conversation with Darren Sproles when they were teammates briefly in Philadelphia.

“He was like, ‘Hey look, a lot of people are going to say a lot of different things about you that you can’t play, you’re too small, you don’t have a big enough heart, you don’t have a lion’s instinct,’” said Mostert, who was undrafted out of Purdue. “You’ve got to be true to yourself.”

At 31, Mostert is at the age that many running backs are sent unwillingly into retirement, replaced by younger legs. But because Mostert didn’t start getting regular NFL carries until 2019, there’s less tread on the tires.

His 506 NFL carries are outside the top 20 among active backs, well below the 1,909 by 28-year-old Ezekiel Elliott and well below the 1,307 by 28-year-old Dalvin Cook.

“I’m truly blessed just because I didn’t get that tread on me early on,” Mostert said. “So it actually saved me and I feel like it just helped prolong my career. I’m truly happy about that.”

And the elite speed endures: He reached 21.62 mph on his 43-yard touchdown run against New England, highest by any NFL running back through the first two weeks of the season.

Mostert is validating the Dolphins’ decision not to aggressively pursue Cook in free agency or offer early round draft picks for Colts star Jonathan Taylor during trade talks weeks ago.

Mostert’s 240 rushing yards were fifth most in the league (through three weeks) entering the “Monday Night Football” games, and his 5.9 yards per carry average was tied for second in the league, behind Buffalo’s James Cook.

“When you have a lot of naysayers out there, they want to continue to [say] ‘I wish this player was here,’” Mostert said after rushing 13 times for 82 yards on Sunday. “I’ve always been an underdog. And that’s OK, but I’m going to show everybody. I’m going to prove everybody wrong because that’s what fuels me the most is proving somebody wrong.”

Nobody appreciates Mostert more than McDaniel.

“His game has progressed,” McDaniel said. “He’s developed confidence, conviction. His vision is better, he’s more decisive. As you guys could see [against New England], and it was very evident at the end of the season last year, he is a hard tackle. Pound-for-pound, he might be one of, if not the, strongest person on the team. He’s just unique in that way.”