i found this;
Noisy Football League
By John Oehser
Times-Union sports writer,
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- At 6-foot-5, 305 pounds, Fred Miller may not feel panicked often, but for an NFL offensive tackle, this was it: the nightmare. The then St. Louis Rams lineman was living it.
In his ears was what players call white noise, sound so loud that it's not loud. It's more of a hum, like a television left on all night. Across from him was the NFL's fastest 265 pounds of muscle in years, Titans defensive end Jevon Kearse, who on that day last October was definitely in Miller's head.
But mostly in Miller's head was the noise at Adelphia Coliseum in Nashville, then three months old but already one of the NFL's loudest stadiums. There is a feeling Titans defensive end Kenny Holmes gets when the noise gets to a guy he's playing, when the guy's stomach jumps and his hands twitch. Crowd noise leaves the periphery and becomes a dominant force -- and Holmes sensed it that day.
"You maybe don't see it in their eyes, but I get this feeling, somewhere, that it's getting them," Holmes says.
How loud is loud?
Miller, now with the Titans, false started six times and coaches and players blamed crowd noise. That's loud.
Adelphia, where the Jaguars play tomorrow, became such an edge that the Titans, who lost half their home games from 1995-1998, won 10 consecutive there without a loss.
But how loud is too loud? And what can be done about it without ruining the "integrity of the game?"
Those are the core elements to the long-standing debate over NFL crowd noise. The debate involves technology and psychology.
The debate gets goofy at times.
It comes down to this: despite technological advances, many officials and players are in no hurry to combat excessive noise, even when it hurts the quality of the game.
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"You'd think with technology being what it is," Rams offensive line coach Jim Hanifan said, "you could come up with something to balance it out."
Can the NFL come up with something? Earplugs? Audio devices? Yes.
Will the NFL come up with something? That is the question.
"The phrase is, 'Star Wars football,' " said Buccaneers general manager Rich McKay, a co-chair of the NFL's competition committee. "There's a worry of too many gadgets and gizmos. There is a general feeling of wanting to guard against that."
So the NFL remains an excessively noisy place, and when it comes to noise, often an amusing one, too.
'What did you say?'
There is no glass separating the press box and the crowd in the RCA Dome in Indianapolis. The crowd noise flows in unencumbered. The Jaguars are in town. The Colts seem to score every other minute, and the William Tell Overture plays as often. Concentration is as difficult as hearing the person a seat away speaking. The thought occurs, "Aren't there rules against this?"
The answer is yes. A team can be penalized five yards if its fans are judged too loud for an opponent to operate. Opposing teams, though, rarely complain for fear of worsening the noise on ensuing plays. There are also clear rules in the NFL rule book about what can be done to encourage noise.
A team can play music. It cannot play music once an opposing offensive team breaks the huddle.
A team can flash messages on its scoreboard. Messages can't encourage noise by saying phrases such as "12th man," "Pump it Up," "Noise," or "Get Louder."
A team can flash "Push 'Em Back," or "Defense." It cannot flash the message once the opposing offense leaves the huddle.
A team can have speakers at field level, but no more than four and not pointed at an opponent's bench.
A crowd may do "The Wave." A team may not encourage the wave, not even the cheerleaders.
The Jaguars have never had a complaint filed against them, spokesman Dan Edwards says, but around the NFL, rules are bent, sometimes to comical results.
"Remember, people running the scoreboard and the PA, they're fans, usually," Rams Vice President Bob Wallace said. "Sometimes, they get carried away."
Wallace spoke from experience. He was at the heart of what at times last season became an odd case of NoiseGate.
After the Titans game and after a mid-season loss in Detroit, the Rams complained to the NFL about crowd-noise violations.
They claimed, as did several teams, that the Titans piped in false crowd noise, which Titans president Jeff Diamond said was untrue. The Rams also claimed the Titans' public address announcer said "Defense" over the loud speaker, a violation.
Wallace says the NFL office told him there had been violations in Detroit and Tennessee, and that a letter of reprimand would be sent to both teams. The NFL later clarified its finding and publicly said that while the Titans and Lions had violated scoreboard codes, they had not been found to be pumping in crowd noise. No reprimand was sent.
Wallace was irate, but faced the same issue again late last season. The Giants accused the Rams of facing speakers at their bench, piping in noise, displaying "Make Noise" signs on the scoreboard and said that public address announcer Jim Holder was "out of control."
"Certainly, there are teams with people working the stadium who bend some of the spirit of the rule," Jaguars Vice President Michael Huyghue said.
A team guilty of violations can be fined up to $10,000. No teams were fined last season, but the league has monitored closely this season.
"With some of the things that have gone on, we have had a new focus of, 'Let's make sure everybody knows what we can and can't do,' " McKay said.
Wallace said after the Giants game that the NFL watched the Rams carefully, and in a playoff game didn't appreciate what it saw. When the Vikings broke huddle early, the scoreboard flashed, "Be Quiet." The crowd cheered louder.
"I thought it was very clever," Wallace said. "We were being polite."
NFL officials stopped the "Be Quiet" messages well before game's end.
Advantage/Disadvantage
Focus on the hands. Jaguars offensive tackle Zach Wiegert held his palms out, arms extended. A blocking stance, imaginary defender in front of him.
In a calm circumstance, Wiegert said he moves from his pre-snap stance to this blocking stance without his eyes leaving the defender.
"That's the ideal," he says.
Tomorrow in Adelphia will be far from ideal. Kearse, who had 14 sacks last season, will be the opponent. On most plays, if Wiegert watches Kearse before the play, he will not hear quarterback Mark Brunell say "hut" to start the play.
Often, when players speak of home-field advantage they speak vaguely of momentum and intimidation, but this is the tangible effect of noise. Unable to hear, visiting quarterbacks use a "silent" count on which players watch for the snap before moving. This isn't unusual for receivers or backs, but for a lineman it means waiting a split second longer -- the time it takes to turn the head toward the defender.
"It may not sound like much," Jaguars tackle Tony Boselli said, "but when you're out there, it's an eternity."
Demonstrating his point, Wiegert showed where his hands would be while pass blocking on a normal snap, hands straight ahead, arms extended, at shoulder height and inside the width of his shoulders. When showing his body position on a silent snap, Wiegert moves his hands eight-to-10 inches to the right of his normal setup, needing the extra space just to compensate for Kearse's jump on the count during his trademark outside speed rush.
"He's quick off the ball if you know the count," Wiegert said, laughing. "Being in a situation where you can't hear and he's that fast [makes it] that much tougher.
"You've got to look out of the corner of your eye, and basically you're both moving at the same time. At home, you get that split second. Your edge is you know the snap count. That split second means he's on you right off the bat. You're in chase mode from the time the ball is snapped."
Wiegert said noise also hurts when Brunell changes the play at the line, known as an audible. On weeks before road games, Wiegert said he spends extra time studying audibles, because if he turns to Brunell and gets nothing but moving lips and white noise, he basically has to guess Brunell's call, and do the best he can.
"You never want to guess, but, sometimes, when you can't hear, there's not much choice," Wiegert says.
That's the extent of the theories from players, who believe tackles and tight ends -- far enough from the quarterback to be unable to hear yet unable to use hand signals -- get the worst of noise.
"No tackle wants a silent count," Jaguars tackle Leon Searcy said.
But Bill Clark, Chairman of Speech and Hearing at Washington University in St. Louis, has studied the effects of noise at Rams games, and said it hurts players after the snap, too.
Clark's position is that elite-level athletes, such as Rams All-Pro wide receiver Isaac Bruce, play at so high a level that the distraction of a deafening crowd translates into occasional dropped balls. Such an effect, he said, typically would be seen on plays when the player is concentrating on a ball in the air -- kickoffs, punts or passes -- where any distraction of a player's concentration can affect his hand-to-eye coordination .
"There's evidence from studies on mental concentration and motor coordination, coordinating how hands move," Clark said. "Does it affect a high school game? Probably not. NFL players perform at the limit of human capacity of mental concentration and physical performance."
Clark said when the decibel level remains constant above 100, which it can at louder stadiums, noise hurts performance.
"They're so close to perfect that what would be meaningless to you and me is an important factor," he said. "They're at the edge of the envelope.
"If you're at 99.9 or 99.8 percent capacity, things that influence .1 percent of performance become huge. As they get closer to perfect, the issue becomes more important."
Hearing aids
Miller, who signed with Tennessee last off-season, doesn't discuss crowd noise anymore. Hanifan, his coach at the time, does.
Hanifan, an NFL line coach for 25 of his 73 years, saw what was happening last October and knew the signs. He benched Miller for a series, told him to forget it, that what'd happened had happened to even the best linemen. He said he wasn't lying.
"I've had absolutely tremendous players -- I don't want to name names -- but they got it, the same way," Hanifan said. "You have pride, things start going a little bad, then you can't hear. Hell yes, it can get to a guy."
Which is why Hanifan can't believe something can't be done.
"Something to get us back to an even keel," he says.
Audiologists say technology is available. The question is, will the NFL allow it?
Before the Titans game, the Rams were concerned enough they ordered earplugs, they were called "noise eliminators," for their linemen.
They worked as follows: First, Mike Marino of Southwest Hearing Aids, Inc., in St. Charles, Mo., measured the decibel levels and pitch of quarterback Kurt Warner's voice. Then, he measured the decibel levels and pitch of the crowd noise at the TWA Dome. He fit Rams linemen for ear pieces programmed to block the crowd. The device reduces targeted frequencies by 15-to-20 decibels, enabling the quarterback's voice to be heard.
Before the game, the NFL ruled they couldn't be used because it doesn't allow electronic ear pierces. The NFL experimented with the pieces during selected games this preseason, but McKay, the co-chair of the competition committee, said he doesn't yet have enough information from participating teams to determine the device's effectiveness.
The Rams used them in one preseason game, ironically, at Adelphia. Hanifan said his linemen indicated they helped at times, but there were flaws -- the same flaws he said occur with more conventional plugs to block all noise, which are legal under NFL rules if they're not electronic.
"Everybody has tried this or that," Hanifan said. "The problem is they worked for some guys, but a couple of guys get them knocked out early in the game. They say, 'Ah, screw it.' That ends that idea."
But should it?
Jim Lombardo, audiologist at the Marshall Clinic in Wausau, Wis., said the problem is solvable with an electronic ear piece.
Lombardo said he worked with half the NFL teams in the early 1990s and found a non-electronic piece that worked. He said because each piece had to be maintained and custom-fitted, that system proved too cumbersome to maintain for all teams.
He also encountered a problem when ABC's 20/20 did a story on the piece, known as the Etymonic-15. The piece is widely available, but Lombardo said it only works properly when used with a system involving measuring quarterback voice frequency. Teams began using the piece without the system. Lombardo said it failed and teams lost faith in the concept.
"The process got a bad rap," Lombardo said. "You must fit every new player who comes in and adapt for every change made. If you don't do the whole system, players become dissatisfied. Now, there's an impression, 'Too many problems. Let's not do it.' "
Lombardo said since the league resists change, there is a misconception that "electronic" means radio signals in helmets between quarterbacks and teammates. According to Lombardo, those wireless radio systems can't work because signals too easily malfunction. But he said in the mid-'90s he recommended a system similar to the one the league tried in preseason.
"That has the greatest potential," Lombardo says. "It absolutely would work. What you run into, though, is there are people who don't want this problem solved."
Which is the feeling of those who matter most -- the competition committee. Each February, McKay said crowd noise comes up. The committee will discuss the electronic piece in the off-season.
Three committee members, McKay, Colts President Bill Polian and Titans coach Jeff Fisher, were interviewed for this story. All opposed ear plugs. Fisher said "the game's too technical as it is. You should have home-field advantage."
"We've never found something quite workable," Polian said. "Whether the [electronic] ear pieces are the thing, we don't know yet. If we could level the playing field in a way that's efficient, that's the way to go. Frankly, there is thought that noise is part of our game. Unless we find the right system, it may be best to monitor it best we can, but leave it as it is on the field."
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