A new NFL experience

By: 
Bill Huber
Correspondent

I’ve got a confession to make.

My favorite NFL stadium was the Minnesota Vikings’ old home, the Metrodome.

Now, to be clear, the place was dump. It had all character of cheap white bread. It was as ugly on the outside as it was on the inside. It was devoid of history and charm. There was one small bathroom in a cramped press box. The pregame meal was terrible.

But, man, what a place to watch a football game. Inexplicably, the media was given some of the best seats in the house. I would be stationed somewhere around the 30-yard line, maybe 20 rows up. And it wasn’t a cozy, enclosed press box. Media was right out there with the fans, and then-general manager Ted Thompson and other organizational leaders were a row or two behind me.

I remember in 2009, when Brett Favre was starting for Minnesota, two fans wearing some sort of hand-crafted fur hats came walking up the aisle and started shouting at Thompson, in rather colorful language, telling him he was, well, not very smart for getting rid of Favre.

That’s why I liked it, though. It was so incredibly loud, and so different than the cozy quiet of Lambeau Field’s comfy press box. The feeling is similar at the Vikings’ four-year-old U.S. Bank Stadium. The packing list is the same. Computer and cord, notebook and pens, audio recorder and bottle of Ibuprofen. Even though we might as well be viewing the game from Pluto we are so far from the action, the noise is deafening. Since it’s usually a bipartisan crowd for Packers-Vikings, the noise is unrelenting. Frequently, it’s impossible to communicate with the person to my left or right.

Honestly, it’s spectacular.

That’s what made Sunday’s season-opening game at Minnesota so incredibly weird. The stadium was empty, aside from a socially distanced press area at maybe one-third capacity. It was just like watching a Packers training camp practice.

You could hear Aaron Rodgers’ cadence, player reactions and the officials’ whistles all over the background music. I was always rather dubious of Minnesota’s animated decibel meter when it would read 110db, but now I believe it. The NFL is allowing teams to provide 70db of ambient noise. It might as well have been 10.

It seems louder when I coach my kids’ flag football games. There was no “Skol” chant, which is really cool, and no fans singing the “Skol, Vikings, Skol,” fight song, which is really lame.

“Weird. Really weird,” was Davante Adams’ incredibly accurate description after the game.

Even the trip to the game was weird. For those of you who’ve gone to Lambeau, you know the bottleneck that forms on Wisconsin 29 and U.S. 41 on the drive to and from the stadium. On Sunday, it was an easy trip to parking and an eerie calm outside the stadium. There were no bands playing. No masses of fans swarming near the cool Viking ship and sail located outside the southwest corner of the stadium. No anticipation of the border war that was to come.

That’s going to strike me this Sunday when I make my way to Lambeau Field for my 13th season covering the team. There will be no smell of tailgating outside the stadium or brats cooking inside the stadium. No joy from fans young and old fired up to see the Packers. No “Go Pack Go” chants from fans entering and exiting the venerable stadium.

Lambeau Field has been home to a lot of historic moments. Sunday will be another. After 350 consecutive sellouts, the metal bleachers will be empty for the game against the Detroit Lions. It will be football without a game of catch between some lucky fans and Tim Boyle. Football without Lambeau Leaps. Football without 78,000 fans serving as the 12th man on defense. It will be fun. It just will be incredibly different.

“The weirdest thing will be the no fans, for sure,” Rodgers said recently. “As a golf fan, hearing Tiger and Phil and some of the longtime players talk about how they’ve enjoyed feeding off the energy in the crowd (in the past), it’s very similar in our sport. Whether you’re at home or on the road, there’s an energy that’s innate to those certain places that you’re just not going to have.

“Minnesota is always a place that’s tough to play, and it’s because that crowd is into it and it’s loud. Even when you’re on the road, you can feed off that energy. There’s a joy in silencing a road crowd. And then when you’re playing at home in Lambeau, when things get rolling, it’s just like a snowball going downhill. I’ll miss ‘The Wave’ and ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and the beer races and the little idiosyncrasies that make our stadium so special.”

Someone recently called today’s world of masks and social distancing the “new normal.” Lord, I hope not. Nothing about this is normal. But at least for three hours on Sunday, there will be football. It will look different, it will sound different, it will smell different. But it’s football, which sure as hell beats the alternative.

Bill Huber is a NEW Media correspondent and Green Bay Packers beat writer for PackerCentral, a Sports Illustrated Channel.