The sound and the fury
NFL should put a lid on crowd interference
Posted: Thursday October 15, 1998 04:29 PM
This will strike you as hopelessly square.
I watched Jacksonville coach Tom Coughlin work his cheerleading
routine for the home fans Monday night and it gave me the creeps. For
those of you who didn't see it, it was the same old stuff the defensive
players do, raising their arms to the crowd to make sure the volume goes
way up, so the enemy offense can't hear the signals.
I'm not wild about the sight of the players asking for help from some
character with a six-pack under his seat, although I can understand guys on
the field getting fired up. But a coach? Let's put it this way, it simply
ain't dignified.
See, I told you, this was going to be Square City, straight out of
Knute Rockne and Legends of the Game, but wait, there's more.
The idea of a coach as a real Monday-night man of the people might strike
some of you as quaint. Just look how much he cares, etc. But as
wild as he got on the sidelines, Vince Lombardi never indulged in
this kind of rabble-rousing. Nor did Bill Walsh. Nor Tom
Landry. Could you see Landry giving the up-up-and-up signal to
the crowd? It would have been as repellent to him as the idea of waving a
pom-pom. No, these men tried to beat people with skill and ability; they
left the cheerleading to the girls in sequins.
Not everyone felt that way. I mean, crowd noise putting a real hammer on
the other team's offense is an edge so seductive that it's tough to ignore.
I remember covering a game in Washington when Joe Gibbs was
coaching, and listening to his Saturday radio show. Part of it was devoted
to instructions for fans who might be a little slow in the IQ department.
"And when you see big number 72 (DE Dexter Manley ) wave his arms
in the air," Joe said, "make sure you make all the noise you can. Remember,
don't do it when our team has the ball. That wouldn't help us."
Right, coach, I think I've got it now.
Didn't like it then. Don't like it now. I remember talking to Joe about
it next time I saw him. He looked at me like I was nuts.
"Happens to us when we go on the road," he said. "Why shouldn't we do it
to the other guys?"
Same kind of thinking that I heard from a sergeant in basic training when
I asked him why he was going out of his way to be so nasty to the recruits.
"I had to take it in basic," he said, "and I vowed that someday I'd be
twice as tough."
Tom Coughlin brought the crowd to its feet in Jacksonville AP | |
Baseball is noisy but no one in the stands is called upon to influence the
outcome of the game. Personally, I don't think it should be part of
football. In the late '80s the league agreed and returned to an obscure
set of rules that was in the books but never enforced.
If the visiting team quarterback can't hear, he informs the referee, who
gets the defensive players to assist him in quieting the crowd. Then he
makes an announcement, telling the fans to pipe down. If that doesn't
work, he announces that crowd noise could cost the home team a timeout.
Then another one. Then a penalty. And on and on, with the severity of
punishment gradually increasing to the point of forfeiture of a first-born
child. O.K., O.K., he can drop another flag.
Naturally, what this does is incite the crowd to undreamed-of levels of
fury and madness. We paid our thirty bucks, no one's telling us when we
can yell and when we can't!
And sure enough it happened, in a 1989 exhibition game in the Superdome.
Cincinnati quarterback Boomer Esiason stopped play because he
couldn't make his signals heard, and he got the ref's ear and swung the
argument and timeouts were forfeited, and, if I remember correctly, there
was even a penalty or two. The game was held up for a while, amid riotous
conditions, and next day every paper with an editorial page took a shot at
the dictatorial NFL interfering with fans' right to cheer, and the league
-- which, as we all know, is very much into image -- sent the crowd-noise
regulations back into mothballs and instructed its referees to politely
inform the QB: "Shut up and play. You can hear fine."
And now quarterbacks never even hint at the fact that they're having
trouble hearing, knowing how this would light up the crowd. Instead, there
is an elaborate set of hand and foot signals, which might or might not
work.
And here's where I'll lose all of you, because I've found very few people
who agree with me. Bring back those rules. Take away timeouts. Drop the
flag. Make the combat more equal. First game in which you do it -- chaos.
Near-riot. Fans at breakout level. Hold firm, even if it severely wounds
the home team. By the end of the game, maybe the fans will get the picture
and will be a bit calmer. No? Then hit 'em again until they behave. Do it
the following week, and the week after. Newspapers will rip you for a
while, then go on to other things. But eventually things will settle down,
and overall, the quality of professional football will be improved.
There, I've gotten it off my chest. Idealistic, unrealistic, perhaps even
a bit loony. We know this will never happen. But I firmly believe that it
should. Coaches and players work too hard preparing themselves each week
to have the outcome influenced by some yahoos in the stands, occasionally
encouraged by yahoo coaches.
I've even had quarterbacks disagree with me.
Archie Manning guessed that the fans in New Orleans were so mad at the
team, when he was a Saint, that they'd use the rules to sabotage their own
club.
"Drowning out the other team's signals is an NFL tradition," Bernie Kosar
once told me, laughing. "I'd love to see the things you want, but you
could never pull it off."
There's what's right and there's what's real, and it's too bad the two are
so far apart.
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