"The only way to describe what it's like to play football totally deaf is to think of what it sounds like when you're underwater," says Peck, who wears hearing aids in both ears. "You hear, but you don't hear. When somebody hits you, you hear that."

The Gallaudet quarterback can use sign language to "audible" a change in the play at the line of scrimmage, but he must first wave his arms to get the attention of the receivers and the backs. The center gives a similar signal to the line.

Pelletier signs instructions to the players, but during games a hearing assistant stands on the roof of a nearby field house to relay suggested plays by headset to another hearing coach on the sideline, who then translates in sign to Pelletier.

On the field, the quarterback signs the play for his teammates as they stand with their backs to the line of scrimmage, shielding the signals from their opponents' eyes. In fact, the huddle was invented at Gallaudet in the 1890s to prevent opposing defenses from stealing the signs from the quarterback as he called plays.

Assistant coach Klees, who is not deaf, became fluent in signed English after he started coaching at Gallaudet in 1986. "If you don't learn it, they have no respect for you," he says. "They'll tell you to get the hell out." Klees had a great deal to learn but found there were also advantages to working with a deaf team. "I don't know if I could get used to wearing a whistle again," he says. "It's so peaceful. I come here after a full day of work [as a forensic analyst for the federal government], and I don't ever say a word."

Gallaudet's games don't look very different from those of hearing teams, except in the stands, where Bison fans tend to watch each other as much as the game in order to make the eye contact needed to communicate. When the home team scores, instead of applauding, Gallaudet fans hold their hands over their heads and wiggle their fingers.

Another difference is that a Gallaudet team manager is stationed on the sideline next to an enormous bass drum. Since the players cannot hear the quarterback call a cadence at the start of each offensive play, the manager, who has been told the snap count, strikes the drum, the vibration carries down the line of scrimmage, and the ball is snapped. The drum is the team's giant heartbeat. "Sometimes in practice when the drum is broken," Pelletier says, "we try to go ahead without it, and everything just falls apart."

The play usually begins with the first beat of the drum, but not always. When Gallaudet badly needs five yards for a first down, the players are often told in the huddle to hold for an extra beat or two. "At the start of the game it's very unnerving [for the opposition]," says Klees, who coached against Gallaudet for nine years while he was an assistant at nearby Catholic University. "It's like trying to put your foot in the wrong pants leg."

Gallaudet, which was founded in 1864, was chartered by Congress to teach and grant college degrees to the deaf. The school, which now also includes a day school for elementary students and a residential program for junior and senior high school classes, was named for Rev. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the first renowned American educator of the deaf.

The campus was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the landscape architects who designed New York City's Central Park, though it is hard to imagine that they had anything to do with Hotchkiss Field, the balding pasture where the Bison thunder silently on autumn afternoons. The field rests upon the forgotten composts and harvests of ancient farmland, a geology so redolent of its own history to the deaf players' heightened sense of smell that the pitch was for a time named Garlic Field.