Football is BACK!  Who’s excited?!  Anybody excited??  How could you NOT be excited?  Seeing as I AM The SportDork, and I owe it to my legions of fans, I tuned in for a little while last Sunday to see what 2020 NFL Pandemic Football looks like.  And truth be told, I was a little excited because Mrs. SportDork and I happened to be in the Tampa, Florida area, where one of the local network games featured the New England Patriots and the other featured the hometown Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  The storylines surrounding those two teams were too compelling for me to pass up.  Cam Newton in a Patriots uniform?  Saying you don’t want to see what that looks like would be like saying you’d have no interest in trying habanero flavored Pringles.  It might not end well, but you’ve got to give ‘em a try.  And Tom Brady in something other than a Patriots uniform for the first time in his fifty-two year NFL career?  It’s like – oh, I don’t know – having a pandemic hit in your lifetime.  You always knew there was a remote possibility it could happen, but when it actually hit, you realized that you were woefully unprepared and that you would need to drink heavily for the next year just to get through it.

I didn’t watch it all, but I saw enough to know that Cam and the Patriots beat the Dolphins, and Brady and the Bucs lost to the Saints.  And because I can’t stay off Twitter, I also know that these two outcomes are definitive proof that Bill Belicheck is a genius and the Pats are going to win the Super Bowl and the Bucs are destined for a miserable season with a geriatric quarterback whose physical abilities are deteriorating faster than Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities.

Being a man of moderate intellect who has watched a fair amount of football over the years, I briefly considered the notion that maybe the disparate outcomes of the two games rested a good deal on the quality of each team’s opponent, and that maybe the Patriots prevailed over a lesser opponent in the Dolphins and the Bucs fell to a possible Super Bowl contender in the Saints.  But then I remembered that Twitter is never wrong and no one ever deliberately posts ridiculous ‘hot takes’ in an effort to drive traffic to their website and I scolded myself for even entertaining such a ridiculous idea and finished my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, content knowing the fate of the Patriots and Buccaneers only one week into the NFL season.  Thanks Twitter!!

Other than using my viewing minutes to come to grips with Cam and Tom in unusual jerseys, I also wanted to get a look at what NFL football with no fans in the stadium looks like.  While it took a little while to reconcile the initial shots of the completely empty stands with a field full of players, coaches and referees, it didn’t bother me much because CBS and FOX rarely gave a wide-shot of the stadium once the game started, so it was easy to forget that the stands were empty.  What also made it easy to forget the stands were empty was the networks playing FAKE CROWD NOISE during the telecast.  

Again, because I’m a man of only moderate intellect, it took me about fifteen minutes into the Patriots game before I turned to Mrs. SportDork and said, “Wait a minute – if the stands are empty, where the hell is that crowd noise coming from?”  At this point, Mrs. SportDork, being a woman who prefers Google over thirty minutes of SportDork conjecture, used her next level Google skills to get us the answer.  Apparently, the NFL and the TV networks have come up with a plan to not only play fake crowd noise during the telecasts, but also to simulate crowd noise in each stadium during the game, and each stadium’s crowd noise is tailored to mirror the crowd noise they would typically have with fans.  Sound engineers have been engaged to develop crowd noise tracks for each stadium to be played at various volumes for various circumstances during the game.  And (yes, there’s more), the crowd noise you hear on the telecast may or may not be different than the crowd noise the players are hearing on the field, since each network has the right to play their own crowd noise instead of the stadium crowd noise.  Got that?  Empty stands, fake crowd noise in the stadium which may or may not be the same as the fake crowd noise you’re hearing on your TV, the volume and nature of which are controlled by some dudes in a van.  Or said slightly differently, welcome to The Matrix.

As you may have gleaned by now, I found this crowd noise situation, unearthed by Mrs. SportDork’s googling, quite disturbing.  How could the NFL, CBS and FOX employ such a diabolical plan to dupe their viewers?  Fake crowd noise?  Everything is a lie!!  And who are these men behind the curtains, all over the NFL, holding the fate of each NFL stadium’s decibel level and boo vs. cheer sounds in their hands?  Since when do sound engineers hold the keys to the NFL castle?  Is this going to be the next Deflate-Gate?  I can see it now – it’s Week 17, the final week of the regular season, the Kansas City Chiefs are at the Las Vegas Raiders, fighting for home-field advantage throughout the playoffs, down by six, with a fourth down at the Raiders five yard line, with no timeouts left and twenty seconds remaining with the clock ticking down, and suddenly “Welcome To The Jungle” comes blasting through the stadium at 140 decibels!  The Chiefs can’t get the play sent in from the sideline in time because Axl Rose is screaming too loud, time runs out, the Chiefs lose, losing playoff home field advantage, they have to go to New England for the conference title game, there’s fifteen feet of snow, Patrick Mahomes can’t grip the ball, the Patriots win, and a sound engineer in Vegas who hates the Chiefs but loves Guns N’ Roses is responsible.  A totally predictable outcome if you just put the pieces together.

The other incredibly disturbing thing about this whole fake crowd noise fiasco, other than the fact that I chose ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ instead of ‘Paradise City’ for my hypothetical, is that about five minutes after I discovered this travesty of justice, I had completely forgotten that I was listening to fake crowd noise.  I still can’t decide if that makes me more or less angry about the fake crowd noise.  On one hand, if I can’t even tell the difference between real and fake crowd noise and it’s not impacting my enjoyment at all, what do I care?  On the other hand, how could I be duped so easily, and get used to it so quickly?  They are playing completely fake noises that bear no relation to what I’m watching on my TV, and I’m sitting there like a mindless freaking baboon just soaking it in!  At some point, if I can be fooled by crowd noise this easily, why keep using real players?  Just generate some holographs and create a bunch of algorithms to generate thousands of random outcomes for each game.  If I can sit in front of my TV blissfully happy while listening to fake crowd noise, why would fake Artificial Intelligence players be a problem?  And just think – no more injuries, no more concussions, no more anthem controversies.  Everybody wins!  Well, maybe not the players, but we’re witnessing a season without fans, so could the players be that far behind?

Regardless of where you stand on fake crowd noise or players, there’s one thing we can all agree on:  the officials are the real heroes.  There’s just no denying it.  In today’s NFL, when the game is on the line and you need someone to step up and make a play for your team, you can count on the refs.  Never in the game’s history have the officials found more creative ways to insert themselves at pivotal moments of close contests.  For far too long, officials have been content to merely play a supporting role, letting the players and coaches hog the spotlight with their athleticism and strategy.  But not any longer.  Refs have finally recognized that they’ve been hidden in the shadows, unable to get the attention they deserve, and I for one am happy to see them staking their claim to glory right alongside the players and coaches.  Why should the refs get pushed to the side during the last two minutes of a game?  Why should two world-class athletes competing for a pass be the only heroes deciding the outcome of a contest?  There’s a third party at the table, and he’s got a yellow flag, terrible judgment, and the power to decide a game – and he’s gonna use it!  Remember when you used to watch football without your eyes frantically scanning the field after every play for a yellow flag?  How boring was that?  Yup, there’s only one group that is absolutely essential to football.  Human officials.  Without the refs, who would consistently bring the element of total unpredictability that now decides ninety-five percent of the games?  You’ll never be able to get that from a computer.

So I’m lukewarm on the NFL this year.  I do however plan to keep an eye on it so you don’t have to.  I’m also going to keep watching in hopes that, in addition to fake crowd noise, they introduce fake announcers.  Oops.  Too late.  They did that years ago.