With just a few hours until their game against the Bengals, the Dolphins are trying to do the impossible: try to get something deleted from the internet.
As almost everyone knows, once something is on the internet it’s almost impossible to delete, and the Dolphins are finding that out the hard way after some of their training footage was leaked online on Wednesday. The footage was captured during a team walkthrough that took place at Nippert Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bearcats.
The Dolphins were not scheduled to hold practices in Cincinnati this week, but those plans had to be altered on Tuesday when it became clear that Hurricane Ian would hit Florida hard. Due to the hurricane, the Dolphins had to leave their trip to Cincinnati earlier than planned. The team had to struggle to find a place to practice and so ended up at Nippert.
The problem with practicing at Nippert is that it’s basically in a central location on the University of Cincinnati campus, meaning students walk by it all day. The other problem with training at the Nippert is that even though the stadium is closed, you can still easily look inside. Because of those two issues, it was easy for UC students to catch a glimpse of the Dolphins while they practiced Wednesday.
Several students clearly chose to make a video of the practice and these videos were shared from UC Barstool account. In the video below you can see a short summary of what was shared.
After seeing the footage online, the team were not pleased to see the video leaked. After the footage was shared on social media, the Dolphins immediately got in touch sent Barstool a letter asking them to delete the tweets.
“We want these posts to be immediately removed from Twitter as this content collection was not authorized or permitted,” the Dolphins wrote in a letter.
The twist here is that Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel actually noticed students were watching and possibly filming Miami’s practice, so he decided to do something about it. To at NFL.comMcDaniel fielded 12 offensive players for each practice game so anyone watching the footage wouldn’t get a full idea of what the Dolphins were doing.
You can look at this two ways: either it’s a brilliant tactic, or the Dolphins wasted a run trying to fool some college students. Although the NFL investigated the situation, the league determined that there was no anti-competitive behavior. according to the Washington Post.
Some Dolphins fans on Twitter compared this to Spygate, but let’s face it, they’re two completely different situations. In Spygate, the Patriots were penalized for knowingly filming an opponent’s touchline to try to figure out the coaching staff’s defensive hand signals. In this case, some random college students were walking in a public area, realized they could see the dolphins training, and then decided to film it, and that’s clearly the same conclusion the NFL came to as the The league found no anti-competitive practices in brief investigation.
Despite the problems, the Dolphins thanked the University of Cincinnati for allowing them to use Nippert.
The AFC showdown between the Bengals and Dolphins begins at 8:15 p.m. ET on Amazon Prime.