How the game will sound (in empty stadiums this year):
The Competition Committee will have to determine the decibel levels that can be used while games are being played, but rest assured that there will be some sort of low hum consistently inside the venues. The league doesn’t want to make it easy for teams to find patterns’ in opponents verbal signals and cadences. “There’s got to be an audible hum of some sort,” one GM told me. “There can’t be silence. There’s too much teams can learn from each other if there’s no noise and you hear everything they’re saying.”
On TV, the goal is to make Lions-Packers at Lambeau Field in 2020 in Week 2 sound similar to Lions-Packers at Lambeau in Week 6 last year. “We’ve hired an audio engineer in every market. Of course, it’s one of those things you never expect to have to do, but the pandemic has forced us to innovate. And NFL Films is not only great at the pictures—they’re great at collecting authentic audio.” In each venue, the audio engineers will make the sound available to TV crews. A first down by the home team may generate a modest cheer, a takeaway a bigger cheer, and a touchdown a bigger one than either—and a turnover a groan, or whatever a groan sounds like. The audio will be taken from actual plays in that stadium from the last four seasons.
— Peter King’s (NBC) “Football Morning in America” column, August 31, 2020
