Raiders adjust to new noise mandates without crowds

Maybe, just maybe, if Bank of America Stadium was filled with spectators last Sunday, Raiders coach Jon Gruden wouldn’t have heard quarterback Derek Carr invoke his wife’s name as an audible at the line of scrimmage during a 34-30 victory over the Carolina Panthers.

But absent a capacity crowd of 75,523 — and the 80, 90 or 100-plus decibels it can generate — Gruden heard Carr yell “Cindy Gruden.”

Loud and clear.

“They hear the snap count. The other team gets your snap count,” Gruden said, explaining how the lack of organic crowd noise affects the game.

“They play it all week. You’ve got to change your snap count,” Gruden added. “You’ve got to change your audibles. You have to change your hand signals.”

The NFL sanctioned artificial crowd noise during the 2020 season amid the coronavirus pandemic, but there’s a caveat. It can’t exceed 70 decibels. That decibel level applies for stadiums with or without fans and will be monitored throughout the season by the league, which said in a memo obtained by the Review-Journal that it may adjust the maximum decibel level later in the season.

For context, Chiefs fans registered a record 142.2 decibels at Arrowhead Stadium on Sept. 29, 2014, and Seahawks fans registered 137.6 decibels at CenturyLink Field on Dec. 2, 2013. Both measurements are akin to the noise on an aircraft carrier deck, according to data gathered by Purdue.

So 70 decibels for NFL players is relatively quiet. Perhaps too quiet.

“It’s definitely different than anything I’ve experienced,” Raiders defensive tackle Maurice Hurst said. “You have to bring your own energy for every single play.”

The league has prepared audio for each team and said in the memo that “the purpose of the curated audio is to create an audio landscape (i.e., a baseline ‘murmur’) that masks some field-level audio typically not audible in a stadium with fans.”

The audio must be activated by the time the game begins and remain on whenever the game or play clocks are running. Music can be played at up to 75 decibels during other stoppages in play, a la timeouts or between possessions.

The rules leave little room for creativity, save for some of the songs, which are selected with input from the players. Violating league rules could result in different punishments, per the memo, including fines, suspensions and the forfeiture of future draft picks.

Carr described the fake fan noise as “dull” and said “when you’re playing the game, you don’t really think about it.”

“I think the biggest difference is that first long ball we threw to Henry (Ruggs against the Panthers) there was no reaction,” he said. “Usually you hear a ‘awwww’ or a cheer, or something. You kind of know the outcome of the play. There was nothing. There wasn’t even a buildup. That was really weird.”

Contact reporter Sam Gordon at gordon@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BySamGordon on Twitter.