The season opens with tonight’s match-up between Super Bowl champion Kansas City and visiting Houston with a limited live crowd in attendance.
Social distancing will be observed in the booth as Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth will not be cheek-by-jowl. Sideline reporters will be in the stands. Crowd noise will be piped in and the cameras will try to avoid showing the empty stands. A lot of time has been spent learning from the European soccer leagues, those darn Socialists.
The most obvious adjustment has been to compensate for the absence of in-stadium fans, who normally provide the natural and organic soundtrack for a game. All but five of the league's 32 teams have said they won't have fans at their first home games of the season, either by choice or in compliance with state and local regulations. (The Chiefs, who host the season opener at Arrowhead Stadium, are one of the five that will allow a reduced-capacity crowd.)
The NFL began working this spring on solutions after watching initial broadcasts of the Bundesliga, the German soccer league, which returned to the field in mostly empty stadiums.
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As it turned out, NFL Films was prepared with an answer. Since 2016, it had been recording high-quality audio of fans in every NFL stadium for another project. Its audio team soon began assembling and organizing a customized track for each team, creating five levels of intensity to match distinctive events during a game. Level 2 might be appropriate for a 5-yard run on first down, for example, while Level 5 could be saved for a winning touchdown in the fourth quarter.
The NFL hired audio operators in each local market to manage a soundboard while watching the game from inside the stadium. The feed will be mixed into the broadcast, the league hopes, in a way that replicates what viewers normally hear from the home crowd in that particular stadium.
There’s is lot of information on how things are planned for now.
There are games scheduled to happen in the LA and SF areas.
Here’s the week one schedule.
Go your team!
