Being as the team already has defensive tackles Daniel McCullers and rookie third-round draft pick Javon Hargrave on their roster, there was no reason to look at Howard as anything more than a potential practice squad player if they even looked closely at him at all.
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There were six players in the draft, and they are now all free agents.
The six-foot-five, 200-pound Simonise earned All-Canadian honours last season with 51 catches for 1,079 yards and 11 touchdowns in eight games with Calgary. Like several of this year’s prospects, Simonise declared for the supplemental draft because he was ruled ineligible for 2016 due to academics. Teams that select a player in the supplemental draft lose a draft choice in the corresponding round of the next year’s National Football League draft. The most intriguing player is Ra’Zahn Howard of Purdue, and he’s a somewhat limited, huge, run-stuffing nose tackle. It is carried out via email among teams and is not televised. The teams are slotted into three groups based on their won/loss percentage the previous year and are then placed in a lottery with the official order generally not being released to the public. The Dolphins were followed by the San Diego Chargers, Tennessee Titans, New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys. Battle was the first player selected in the supplemental draft since 2012, when the Cleveland Browns used a second-round pick on Baylor receiver Josh Gordon.
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Teams simply submit a list of players they are interested in drafting, and which round of the draft they’d like to select that player in. They can sign anywhere that they would like, just like players after the main NFL Draft that happened in the spring.
