With just hours to go until their game against the Bengals, the Dolphins are trying to do the impossible: They're trying to get something erased from the internet.
As almost everyone knows, once something is on the internet, it's almost impossible to get it erased and the Dolphins are finding that out the hard way after some of their practice footage leaked online Wednesday. The footage was taken during a team walk-through that was held at Nippert Stadium, which is the home of the Cincinnati Bearcats.
The Dolphins weren't supposed to hold any practices in Cincinnati this week, but those plans had to change on Tuesday when it became clear that Hurricane Ian was going to hit Florida hard. Due to the hurricane, the Dolphins were forced to leave earlier than they had planned for their trip to Cincinnati. The team had to scramble to find a place to practice and that's how they ended up at Nippert.
The problem with practicing at Nippert is that it's basically in a central location on campus at the University of Cincinnati, which means students were walking by it all day. The other problem with practicing at Nippert is that even if the stadium is closed to the public, it's still easy to look inside. Due to those two problems, it was easy for students at UC to take a peak at the Dolphins while they practiced on Wednesday.
Several students clearly decided to take a video of the practice and those videos were shared by the UC Barstool account and the Dolphins were NOT happy about that. After the videos got shared, the team immediately sent Barstool a letter asking them to delete the tweets.
"We are looking to have these posts deleted immediately from Twitter as this content capture was not authorized or permitted," the Dolphins wrote in a letter.
Although some Dolphins fans on Twitter have been comparing this to Spygate, it's two totally different situations. In Spygate, the Patriots were punished for knowingly filming an opponents' sideline in an effort to try and 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 practicing and then decided to film it (We're not going to post the footage here, but if you poke around for it on Twitter, you can probably find it).
Despite the issues, the Dolphins still thanked the University of Cincinnati for letting them use Nippert.
The leaked footage likely won't have any impact on the game, but there's always a small chance it could, which is probably why the Dolphins don't want it out
