To the surprise of many, the Cleveland Browns led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers going into the final two minutes of Week 2’s matchup. The home team Bucs struggled to convert drives into touchdowns, settling for four field goals and just one touchdown despite controlling the game on the ground, with 125 rushing yards to the Browns 45.
Not so much a revenge game for QB Baker Mayfield, the Tampa Bay quarterback has a chance to drive his team for a win after quite a few overthrows and an interception. “Has
a chance,” despite this article being published after 5 PM Eastern Time due to a weather delay, as we warned about before the game.
The two teams and fans at the game in Florida were ordered off the field shortly before 4 PM, just as the broadcast was coming back from the 2-minute warning. An announcement at 5 PM in the stadium noted that the delay would continue and the next update would not come until 5:30 PM.
According to the local weather, the delay will likely continue for quite a while:
Once the NFL approves a return to the field, players usually have a 10-minute warm-up period, but given that this delay has lasted over an hour, that period will likely be extended to at least 15 minutes. Each lightning strike also restarts the clock before the game can resume:
The longest NFL weather delay came in 2018, when the Tennessee Titans and Miami Dolphins had two huge ones: 2 hours, 2 minutes and 1 hour, 57 minutes. That game is also the longest game of all time, lasting just over seven hours. Fittingly, that game was also in Florida, hosted by Miami.
