It hasn’t been announced league-wide yet, but it’s almost a certainty the NFL will play without fans in 2020.
For fans, watching on TV will probably seem the same. We’ll likely hear some fan noise cranked into the stadium and on TV, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference.
For players, though, they’ll be able to tell pretty quickly when they look around and see no fans making that noise.
Vikings kicker Dan Bailey said that it’s going to be quite a surprise to a lot of players.
“Not having the crowd noise is going to a lot more weird than we think,” Bailey said via the Pioneer Press. “It’s going to be different. Fans make up so much of the experience of the game.”
For the kicker position especially, I can imagine it will be quite distracting when he’ll be able to hear everything defenders are trying to say.
All PG-13 language, I’m sure.