The coronavirus pandemic has prevented fans from attending games and other various events across the country since March, and it will continue to affect the NFL throughout the upcoming season. The Rams have said SoFi Stadium will be at limited or no capacity, and based on the way things are going right now, it seems unlikely fans will be allowed in the building to start the season.
The team is selling cardboard cutouts for fans to purchase and have arranged around SoFi Stadium, but here’s the thing: Cardboard cutouts can’t yell, cheer, boo or provide a home-field advantage.
As a result, the Rams will probably pump artificial crowd noise into the stadium on Sundays in an attempt to replicate fans’ excitement on gamedays. They tried that on Saturday night during their first scrimmage and needless to say, it did not go well.
“I don’t know about you guys, but how irritating was that constant crowd noise that just never stopped?” McVay said Sunday, unprompted by reporters. “That’s not how crowds are. They don’t just consistently sustain that noise. My eardrums, and then the frustration from the communication issues, I was ready to lose my mind yesterday.”
McVay wasn’t alone, either. Cooper Kupp also had a media session with reporters Sunday and he vented about the crowd noise, too.
Kupp was asked what he thought about the artificial cheering and after throwing SoFi Stadium some praise, he discussed how annoying the noise was on the field.
“In terms of the crowd noise, it was extremely irritating, but I didn’t notice it until – it was kind of like white noise until I realized that it was crowd noise,” he said. “Then I couldn’t stop hearing it. It was like, you want to talk to someone, but you couldn’t because you realize there’s this white noise just drowning out anything you wanted to say. It was fine until unfortunately I noticed that it was the crowd noise. It was very irritating.”
Part of the issue was the fact that the crowd noise was just constant. It wasn’t realistic by typical standards, where the home crowd quiets down when the Rams are on offense and gets loud when the opponent is trying to operate on third down.
That was McVay’s biggest gripe with the fake crowd noise, and understandably so.
“These fans, they have an understanding of when an offense is at work, you’re quieting it down and when the defense goes, you know, they’re really sustaining and there’s a progressive build up, usually, as that play clock kind of ticks down,” Mcvay said.
Eric Williams of Sports Illustrated spoke to Samson Ebukam, who said he wasn’t bothered by the artificial crowd noise. Perhaps that’s because he’s a defender and he’s used to fans being loud when he’s on the field, whereas the offense prefers the crowd to be quieter.
“When you’re in a zone, you don’t really hear anything anyways, especially me,” he said. “So I didn’t really think it was a problem at all. I just played the game.”
The Rams will hold another scrimmage on Saturday, so one would think the artificial crowd noise would be tweaked for the second session at SoFi Stadium.
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