Originally posted by zillabeast:You would still have home field advantage. Footplayers play emotionally. Have 65k screaming fans cheering for you does have a positive effect in your performance. That is also why you see the home team in the Olympics do better than normal. It is not because the fans are preventing the opponents from playing their game. In fact, most football games don't have noisy stadiums that prevent the offense from operating normally, but it is still assumed that the home team has an advantage.
Originally posted by kray28:
It's ironic that people who use this are sometimes the least intelligent people of the board.
He's got a point though
Home Field Advantage is one of the drawing interests keeping people going to NFL games, and the NFL is all about selling all the tickets they can
Hamstring that advantage in the name of "fairness" and it's just icing on top of the many thousands of other reasons people would rather watch a game from the comfort of their own home
I would also like to address a "straw-man" argument on this board. I think most agree that the refs should not be telling the fans to be quieter (although I did include it as an option to see if it had any support). I think the most popular approach to reducing the impact of screaming fans was to put speakers in all helmets to help the offense to communicate. If that approach was taken, fans could still yell as much as they wanted. They would probably yell less, though, since they know that they won't be able to prevent the offense from communicating.