Super Sunday, and the Crowd Goes, Um, Silent
Fans of the Seattle Seahawks collectively call themselves the 12th Man, an extra player with a noise level so pounding at their home stadium that seismologists have recorded minor earthquakes during big plays.
Fans of the Denver Broncos have a long reputation for noise that rattles visiting opponents, too, including a tradition of stamping their feet to create a rumbling called Rocky Mountain Thunder.
Both franchises used the high-decibel help of their hometown crowds to help win conference championship games Sunday. But when their teams meet in the Super Bowl on Feb. 2 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Seattle’s 12th Man and Denver’s Rocky Mountain Thunder will be mere echoes from distant time zones.
The Super Bowl is where the National Football League’s famed fan noise goes to die. What the hundreds of millions of viewers around the world may not realize, from the comfort of couches in front of big-screen televisions with the volume turned high, is just how strangely quiet it can be at a Super Bowl game.
“There’s not a lot of crowd noise,” said Ron Jaworski, an ESPN analyst who was the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles when they reached the Super Bowl at the end of the 1980 season. “People mostly sit on their hands, outside of the fans that buy the tickets for the team. It’s kind of a corporate get-together.”
The difference in game-time atmosphere this season will be starker than usual, given the vocal support usually afforded the Seahawks and the Broncos and the location of the game, far on the other side of the country.
The N.F.L. is the only major American professional sports league to play its championship at a neutral site. Although hosting a game can be a coup for a sponsoring city, such as New York, the effect is to neuter the energy level of the game itself.
Only 35 percent of Super Bowl tickets are divided between the participating teams. For this year’s game, with a projected crowd of roughly 80,000, that means about 14,000 tickets for the Seahawks and 14,000 for the Broncos.
The rest of the tickets are divvied among the N.F.L.’s other 30 teams (with a larger share for the co-hosting Jets and Giants), with about 25 percent of the tickets controlled by the N.F.L., largely sold and bartered through corporate sponsors and business partners.
“It takes on the atmosphere of a game being played on a Hollywood soundstage,” the CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz said.
The broadcaster Al Michaels has covered eight Super Bowls. The loudest he can recall was Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, Fla., where Pittsburgh fans far outnumbered those of the Arizona Cardinals as the Steelers won with a last-minute touchdown pass.
“Even then, you probably had half the fans there as neutral observers,” Michaels said. “I can’t think of a time where it would ever sound like it would sound in any other venue.”
He added: “If the game is not very good, there is nothing. It might as well be played out in a park somewhere.”
Even if hard-core fans pay huge sums for tickets on the secondary market, the fractured distribution means that the biggest plays of the Super Bowl are typically met with silent nonchalance or quiet frustration from the majority of fans in attendance.
Gone are the wild audial and emotional swings of collective joy and disappointment familiar to N.F.L. fans through the regular season and the playoffs. At a Super Bowl, there is a continual din, each play cheered by some portion of the crowd, but no plays eliciting the full-throated roar of a complete stadium. It can be a surprising thing to witness — and hear — a Super Bowl in person, particularly after attending games in places like Seattle and Denver.
At a Super Bowl, rare are the wasted timeouts and delay-of-game penalties spurred by deafening noise, which count as prizes for vociferous home crowds. During Seattle’s victory over San Francisco on Sunday, Fox periodically used an on-screen graphic to track the decibel level. In Denver, where the Broncos beat New England, the team’s first Super Bowl berth in 15 years was accompanied by a soundtrack of vocal support and foot-pounding thunder.
“We couldn’t have done it without these fans,” Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning said. Like those in Seattle, most of those fans will have no such effect on the Super Bowl.
Fifty years ago, the N.F.L. played its championship games at the home of one of the participants. The prospect of bad winter weather was an accepted component.
That changed when the N.F.L. and the American Football League decided to pit their champions in a contest that came to be called the Super Bowl. The first game, in 1967, was at the Los Angeles Coliseum, in front of about 61,000 fans and tens of thousands of empty seats.
Early games were rotated between California and Florida, mostly. The first 47 Super Bowls, in fact, were played in reliably warm weather or indoors at domed stadiums. This Super Bowl will be the first to be played outdoors in a region not noted for comfortable midwinter temperatures.
Bad weather could numb the excitement, with hand claps deadened by mittens and voices muffled by scarves. It could keep people from attending at all, or chase them into the climate-controlled corporate suites and club-level cocoons.
As luck would have it, neither of this year’s participants is particularly known for having a broad national following, in the vein of the Dallas Cowboys, the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Green Bay Packers. The driving distance from Seattle’s CenturyLink Field to MetLife Stadium is 2,853 miles, according to Google Maps. From Denver’s Sports Authority Field at Mile High, the distance to the Super Bowl is 1,773 miles.
Fred Gaudelli, producer for NBC ’s “Sunday Night Football,” said the atmosphere at two of the Super Bowls he had produced was enhanced by the presence of fans of teams with loyal followings.
“Steelers fans travel everywhere, and you had an entire section of them waving their Terrible Towels,” he said.
“It’s going to be a challenge in New York,” he added. “It’s going to be a very corporate crowd. You wonder how many people will be in their seats, or in clubs, five minutes before the game staying warm.”
It is a long way from home, and home field, and those who secure tickets (often sold for thousands of dollars) and make the trek will be greeted by tighter-than-usual, perhaps unfamiliar, restrictions for game-day frivolity. The authorities, for example, worried about traffic and security in the New York City area, will severely restrict tailgating, the pregame partying at big events.
All that might be enough to keep faithful — and noisy — fans of the teams at home. As if another reason is needed, there is an increasing sense that football, as much as any sport, is a game best seen on a television or computer screen, given the appetite for replays, at-the-fingertips statistics and the comforts of home.
It all raises the question of whether this might be among the quietest Super Bowls ever, a strange juxtaposition to the games Sunday that sent the teams to the championship game.
Regardless, most Super Bowls end the same way. The clock expires, and security officers quickly steer the losing team off the field, cordoning it with ropes away from the celebration for the winners. A stage is hastily erected. Championship hats and shirts are distributed. Confetti falls or is shot from cannons. The public-address system blares a celebratory song from another era, maybe Kool & the Gang.
It all disguises that there is little crowd noise. Most of the people have left. It is the Super Bowl, but it is nothing like home.
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