If you read my quarter-by-quarter in-game updates yesterday (and if you didn’t, boy do I feel sorry for you!) you know I that spent much of the first half of the game wondering what was up with the crowd at FedExField. The stands didn’t look overly empty or overly purple, but I used words like silent, skittish, nervous, muted and odd to describe the way the crowd seemed (to me) to be acting, and I quoted Larry Weisman as saying, “It’s like everyone’s waiting for the roof to fall in.” So it wasn’t just me who noticed.
But when I mentioned this to a few people at Redskins Park this morning, they seemed shocked. The stadium was as loud as ever, people claimed. It was a NOTABLY loud crowd, they said. I must’ve had a different experience behind the press box glass, they suggested.
This was possible, of course, although the press box glass hasn’t changed since the last home game against the Eagles — and I could hear the crowd clearly at that one — so I decided to ask some folks who should be able to hear the home crowd pretty clearly: the players who were on the field.
And they seemed to have noticed the same thing I did.
London Fletcher had, in fact, the EXACT same reaction that I did. “It was a weird type of feeling to the stadium,” Fletcher said. “It wasn’t loud, exactly … I think they were waiting to get loud, but it never really got like that.”
Phillip Buchanon was on a similar wavelength. “Seemed normal,” he told me, shrugging. “I didn’t really think it was loud. I remember the Houston game was kinda loud, but, no — we didn’t really take advantage of the crowd noise yesterday.”
Carlos Rogers said that, in fact, the team did the opposite of take advantage of the crowd noise, and that he started noticing some jeers from Redskins fans near the bench. “We still need your support,” Rogers said. “We already down or we’re already losing, but then to hear from our fans, you know, that’s-it’s not helpful. I mean, we try to block it out but it’s still, it’s not helpful from our fans.”
(A reporter asked if Rogers was being critical of the Redskins fans, and the cornerback was quick to clarify. “I love these fans,” Rogers said. “We got good fans, good supportive fans. I guess they hard on us, and we do give them a reason to be hard on us, because we’re not winning. But, at the same time, you do want that support and encouragement, that, you know, ‘Y’all can pull this out’ or ‘Y’all can turn around,’ instead of, if somebody-another team beating us, they start beating us too.”)
The voice of reason turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be DeAngelo Hall. Hall said that he hadn’t heard any jeers — “I’ve never really heard that. If they are, I don’t really pay much attention” — and that the stadium had been on the quieter side of normal. But, Hall pointed out, that was absolutely fine.
“I don’t think it seemed any louder than any other game,” Hall said. “If anything, it probably wasn’t as loud. I don’t think it was louder than Dallas or those night games. But, you know, anytime you get 90-something-thousand, you’re gonna have a pretty good cheering section. So it was good.”
