…and I couldnt be happier. I know this is mundane and pointless but so is NFL games without fans,
There is no preseason this year, so…?
I love it. Its great to see classic games with so many legendary players.
The only thing fans bring to a telecast is crowd noise. Noise I’d rather not hear while trying to listen to the commentation.
Fans bring adrenaline rushes to both players and viewers. Sports are a social event imo.
Being there certainly is a social event and being in the crowd is part of the attraction of going.
But for watching on TV I want to pay attention to the game play and / or (pPre-COVID) the yakyak with my fellow party-goers / couch sitters.
IMO/IME the loud white noise of the crowd simply detracts from what I want out of their telecast. I can recognize a great play without a roar of pumped-in white noise, thank you.
Then again I despise laugh tracks too; I can figure out what’s funny without help, thank you.
Certainly YMMV applies.
I suspect the show producers have data that more crowd noise sells more advertising. Otherwise why would they bother to pump it into the broadcast? Even in a pre-COVID live crowd situation, the noise we hear on TV is not just whatever happens to be picked up by the commentators’ mikes; it’s deliberately mixed in at a target volume by the controllers in the trailer.