How the NFL Cheats: Home-Field Advantage

Whether you call it breaking the rules, bending the rules or just getting creative with the rules, cheating has always been a part of the NFL and always will be. This is Part 2 in a Bleacher Report series on how NFL players and teams seek out some advantage, any advantage, over their competition. Part 1 was on the use of foreign substances.

Home-field advantage for NFL teams can often feel pronounced. Sometimes it can seem downright preposterous. Unfairly so. Suspiciously so.

Illegally so?

The Falcons are, of course, the poster franchise for this suspicion. In 2013 and 2014, the NFL found, they were playing a low hum in the Georgia Dome—an attempt to infuse energy into a notoriously lifeless stadium. They were docked a fifth-round pick in the 2016 draft and fined $350,000 for the over-the-line attempt to boost their home-field advantage.

But the Falcons aren’t the only ones to come up with this idea.

Through the years, visiting teams often have remarked with raised eyebrows about how loud the crowds are in a stadium. Many teams have been suspected of making their stadiums noisier with the aid of loudspeakers in the hopes that opposing offenses couldn’t function as smoothly without seamless communication.

The Vikings are one example. They’ve long been rumored to have enhanced crowd noise in their old stadium, the Metrodome. Former ESPN analyst Jeremy Green once admitted the Vikings were using fake noise when his father Dennis Green was the head coach, though he later backed off the claim, saying it was just his opinion.

Green wasn’t the only one with the opinion.

“They pumped in crowd noise all the time,” says Matt Millen, who attended games in the Metrodome for over four decades in various capacities. “It was going on when I was playing, and it was going on later. They were warned about it repeatedly.”

As a defensive tackle for the Bears and Packers, Steve McMichael played 13 games in the Metrodome.

“I’ll never forget the speakers on the sideline,” he says. “I heard crowd noise coming out of them. They did it every year. Don’t think that doesn’t affect an offense. But if I had an inferior team, I would have done it too. It was a compliment if they had to do something outside the rules to beat me.”

In 2007, it appeared the Colts were caught pumping in artificial noise to the RCA Dome in a game against the Patriots. Television audio captured a skip in the crowd noise. After a league investigation, however, the Colts were cleared and the skipping noise was blamed on tape feedback in a CBS production truck.

“It was really loud,” says Ravens tight end Ben Watson, who was a member of the Patriots at the time. “But once it gets past a certain level, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t think about it. There are a number of places in the league where you have to get this close to hear the quarterback. It may affect the quarterback’s hearing in their helmet. But we can’t hear him anyway. We have to be ready to go silent count anytime you go on the road.”

Turning up the volume is one thing. Turning up the heat is another.

There were murmurings that the Colts tinkered with the thermostat during their 2006 AFC championship game against the Patriots. This is, at best, urban legend. 

Even the …

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