There won’t be many fans in the stands at NFL games this fall, if any. The Falcons recently announced they’re not having fans in Mercedes-Benz Stadium for their two September games, and that might just be a warmup for what’s to come.
Without some sort of augmented noise, those stadiums will be as silent as Drew Brees at a hail mary competition, which means all sorts of issues for teams trying to disguise snap counts, not swear on national television, and so forth. The NFL’s solution to that appears to be to pipe in fan noise.