NFL Game Broadcasts Will Look Different This Season

NFL game broadcasts this season will look different because most games will be played in empty stadiums.

With the Kansas City Chiefs vs. Dallas Texans game taking place last night on Thursday Night Football, the NFL is finally back after what feels like a way-too-long off-season.

If the Thursday Night 34-20 Chiefs victory told Raiders fans anything, besides the fact that the Chiefs are in-shape from the Super Bowl-winning team last year, the NFL game broadcasts will be a lot different this season.

For starters, NBC opted to shoot the field-of-play tighter this year, in a bid to not shoot the empty seats as much as possible. It’s a little bit of a different approach than the Premier League took over in Europe or the Bundesliga did, the latter apparently being used as a starting point for league executives when deciding how to broadcast NFL games this season.

When the game camera, which shoots the wide-angle shots of the game, did show the stands, the first seven to eight shows were tarped off with a Chiefs banner. The other seats had some fans, as Arrowhead Stadium is one of five teams in the league to allow limited capacity fans during the game.

The biggest thing that perhaps is up for debate is the pumping in of fan noise during the game.

According to ESPN, since 2016, NFL Films has collected high-quality audio of fans in every NFL stadium for a different project. During the off-season, the audio team apparently made five levels of intensity to match events that occurred during the game. Boos could also be heard in the pumped in audio such as when Chiefs wide receiver DeMarcus Robinson’s touchdown was reversed by replay officials after Robinson failed to complete the catch.

The biggest kicker is this: the NFL hired audio operators for each team in the league to manage the fan soundboard during the broadcast. No matter who is broadcasting the game, that same audio operators will control how the “fans” react.

The issue with this is when the fan noise sounds like straight-up white noise, it can get distracting at times. It wasn’t fluid and it felt too artificial.

And frankly, in my personal opinion, the quality wasn’t top-notch either.

There’s always going to be the major argument of whether fans prefer artificial fan noise pumped into their broadcast feed or if they rather hear the athletes.

The league and their teams prefer the former, as they ultimately want to mask the language the players use on the field.

Regardless, no matter which network is broadcasting the Raiders' games this season, it’s going to be a different experience for fans everywhere, as they adjust to the new broadcasting norm for 2020.

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