Dolphins vs. Titans is the NFL’s longest game ever due to 2 lightning delays

More weather delays! The Miami Dolphins game against the Tennessee Titans became the second game this week to have a weather delay after the Falcons and Eagles game was delayed on Thursday night. Lightning was seen within a mile of Hard Rock Stadium and the teams were forced to head indoors right before the 1st half ended.

Here are the official NFL rules regarding weather delays:

If, in the Commissioner’s opinion, it is reasonable to project that the resumption of an interrupted game would not change its ultimate result or adversely affect any other inter-team competitive issue, he is empowered to terminate the game.

The game won’t be cancelled, so like Thursday night we’ll just have to wait and see how long the delay takes. It has to be super frustrating for the players and coaches to hit a delay right before they went in for the half. When play resumes, they’ll have just a minute left to go in the second quarter.

The game resumed at 4:10, and had just a 3 and a half minute half because of the two-hour delay:

After one lengthy delay, another one came about 40 minutes after the game started back up.

And we got a meme!

The final total was seven hours, 10 minutes — setting a new mark that could stand for a very long time.

The Dolphins had weather issues in their Week 1 game last season. Scheduled to play in Tampa Bay, the game was postponed until November because of Hurricane Irma.

When the second half finally got restarted, a previously boring game went bananas. It was a 7-3 game in the third quarter at the time of the second delay, but both teams immediately started scoring — even after Blaine Gabbert was forced to take over for Marcus Mariota due to an injury.

The Titans and Dolphins each returned kickoffs for touchdowns, a rare feat for an NFL game:

The back-and-forth, wild end to the game only added more time to the longest game in NFL history and ended up pushing it over seven hours.