The Cowboys are one of the few teams in the league who will start the season with fans in the stands at their home stadium.
The NFL intends to use artificial crowd noise for games without fans present. The noise is expected to be in the 70 to 85-decibel range.
So the Cowboys, who open the season at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles against the Rams, practiced at AT&T Stadium on Sunday night with fake crowd noise.
“It’s league mandated,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said. “They’re trying to pull all the football criteria together for the regular-season games. It seems like they’re not settled on a decibel level – a level of noise – so I was kind of waiting to see exactly how loud it was going to be, particularly the crowd noise that’s going to be the same in every stadium. So that’s a pretty accurate example of what to expect.”
McCarthy made it clear he’s “not a fan.”
“There’s a reason for it, and we’ll be fine,” McCarthy said before later adding, “It’s just not real. I don’t know what you thought of it. You play in stadiums throughout your career and some stadiums have really bad fake crowd noise and some are better than others. You do this long enough, you know what it sounds like. It’s just not the real thing.”
Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady said fake crowd noise “definitely has its challenges.” Then again, so does playing on the road with real fans in the stands.