May 26 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures fell in muted trading on Friday, pressured by a stronger dollar and ahead of the U.S. Memorial Day holiday weekend.

"The cotton crop in the U.S. is off to an average start on the whole and there are expectations of increased average. A lot of people don't want to put capital ahead of a long weekend," said Louis Rose, co-founder and director of research and analytics at Rose Commodity Group.

The December cotton contract on ICE futures U.S. settled down 0.43 cent, or 0.59 percent, at 72.79 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 72.69 and 73.45 cents a lb.

The dollar index was up 0.17 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.47 percent.

Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of 25 May totaled 421,994 480-lb bales, up from 418,593 in the previous session.

"There is going to be a lot of volatility (in July contract)at this point with so much of cotton," Rose said.

"The speculators don't want to take delivery and exited (their positions) by taking profits after the spike in prices and bought December," Rose said.

The July cotton contract on ICE Futures U.S. was mostly unchanged at 77.09 cents per lb. July prices have fallen about 12 percent since touching a near 3-year peak of 87.18 cents last week.

The December contract fell nearly 1 percent, while the July contract shed 3 percent this week.

Total futures market volume fell by 10,850 to 16,244 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 1,988 to 243,943 contracts in the previous session.

(Reporting By Nallur Sethuraman in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)