When the NFL made some in stadium rule changes this week, former Chicago Bears boss, Mike Ditka, was not a fan of the changes. The rule that gets under his skin the most is the rule that allow scoreboards to encourage crowd noise.Ditka called it stupid and thinks it has no place in the game.
"It's stupid," Ditka told the Chicago Sun-Times. "The NFL... who are they appealing to? It would be like the owners working at their desk and all of a sudden, they encourage people to come in their office and make a lot of noise. It doesn't make sense."
As the Sun-Times notes, "stadiums will also be able to encourage crowd noise through the use of audio until there's 20 seconds left on the play clock. In the past, the audio encouragement had to stop at the 30-second mark."
"The key to football is you want to be able to see it executed properly," Ditka said. "You want to hear the snap count. You want to see these guys use their talents where they're not tainted. Sometimes when you have crowd noise, you're not seeing the player at his best."
Well Mike, the NFL is trying to make the environment more fan-friendly, especially the casual fan. However, I do agree with what Ditka is saying. If you're a hardcore football fan, you don't need to know when to make noise. The league needs to cater to the true fan and not the one that has the most money, therefore they have the seats and don't really know what's going on out on the field.
To Roger Goodell, if you really wanted to enhance the fan experience, you'd tell teams to lower ticket prices, concessions and parking fees; then you would see the true fans at the games and wouldn't need a video operator to tell you when to get loud.
