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NFL Random Thought of the Day

The Patriots' Bruce Irvin should be added to the list to watch for ACL injury. By film replay, he sustained a non-contact knee injury that looked very suspicious for an ACL.
 
NFL didn’t tell teams about it plan to focus on “clear and obvious” fouls
September 21, 2020, 10:41 AM EDT

One of this week’s Sunday Splash! reports came from NFL Media, courtesy of NFL senior V.P. of officiating training and development Walt Anderson.

Anderson explained that officials entered the season with a focus on calling only “clear and obvious” fouls.
“When we were preparing, certainly going in, we had a theme of ‘clear and obvious’ and we wanted that to continue throughout the year,” Anderson told the league’s in-house TV/digital conglomerate. “We had to address clear and obvious. You can’t miss clear and obvious and it starts with that. Going forward we don’t want all of a sudden to start calling the ticky tack stuff. We want things that are clear.”

It’s good. It’s encouraging. It’s something that many have wanted the league to do for years.

But it’s also troubling, in one specific way. Per multiple sources, the league didn’t tell its teams about the new focus on “clear and obvious” fouls before the season began.
THE REST OF THE STORY
 
texan279 said:
I noticed that some of the games had stadium/crowd noise being played/piped in. Pretty cheesy IMO...
Click to expand...
How the NFL tried to make fake crowd noise real, from a raucous Kansas City to more boos in Philadelphia
By Ben Strauss
September 20, 2020 at 3:30 a.m. CDT

Vince Caputo has worked in the audio department for NFL Media for 35 years, in a job that mostly has stayed the same. He adds music and sound effects to the prestige NFL Films productions and mixes sound for shows such as “Inside the NFL.”

But this summer, the league came to him with a new question: What could the NFL do for sound on broadcasts if stadiums couldn’t hold fans?

Sports leagues around the world have wrestled with this question as games in empty or near-empty stadiums became the bargain of playing through a pandemic. Beginning with European soccer this summer, fans have, depending on their view, either been treated to the technical wizardry of piped-in crowd noise or bombarded with gratingly fake stadium sounds that rob sports of their authenticity.

Caputo, though, had an idea for how to inject some authenticity into the inauthentic. For several years, he and his crew have been collecting sounds from the crowds at every NFL stadium with the intent to add it to various productions from the NFL. With hundreds of clips at his disposal, he wondered whether they might be the answer.

“We had it catalogued,” Caputo said. “And the need came along: What are we going to do without fans?”
What does baseball sound like during a pandemic? Loneliness — and hope.

Caputo didn’t know how to deploy them until he turned to Robert Brock, director of education at the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences in Tempe, Ariz. For decades, Brock has trained audio technicians and engineers, with many recent students going on to work on video games. In 2006, Brock began working with a new software program called Wwise, which helps bring video game series such as Assassin’s Creed to aural life.

If Caputo’s work at NFL Films work is linear — he adds sound to a finished video product after the fact — what Brock could do with Wwise was something more advanced: adding scripted audio reactions to unpredictable events in real time.

They went to work. Caputo and his team combed through the NFL’s audio clips and isolated crowd noise from every stadium, filtering out the public address announcer and music. Brock categorized them, sorting them into positive and negative reactions from the home crowd with four intensity settings for each — low, medium, high and peak.

For instance: a four-yard run by Saquon Barkley is a low positive reaction from New York Giants fans. A first down pass by Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay probably would earn a medium positive response. But if Tom Brady throws a game-winning touchdown pass to Rob Gronkowski in Tampa Bay, cue the peak setting. There are also four different settings for the crowd noise that builds before every play, denoted by levels 1, 2, 3 and “raucous,” which would be used, for example, on fourth and one with the home team’s defense on the field in the fourth quarter.

There are the clips for boos, too, which Caputo said would not be deployed for poor play but only for an obviously bad call. Certain stadium soundtracks picked up more boos than others, he said. (One of those stadiums, yes, was Philadelphia’s.) There is even separate sound for when a player suffers an injury.
“We don’t want inappropriate crowd sounds if there’s a guy down,” Brock said. “So those are just very neutral ambient elements.”
THE REST OF THE STORY
 
CloakNNNdagger said:
How the NFL tried to make fake crowd noise real, from a raucous Kansas City to more boos in Philadelphia
By Ben Strauss
September 20, 2020 at 3:30 a.m. CDT

Vince Caputo has worked in the audio department for NFL Media for 35 years, in a job that mostly has stayed the same. He adds music and sound effects to the prestige NFL Films productions and mixes sound for shows such as “Inside the NFL.”

But this summer, the league came to him with a new question: What could the NFL do for sound on broadcasts if stadiums couldn’t hold fans?

Sports leagues around the world have wrestled with this question as games in empty or near-empty stadiums became the bargain of playing through a pandemic. Beginning with European soccer this summer, fans have, depending on their view, either been treated to the technical wizardry of piped-in crowd noise or bombarded with gratingly fake stadium sounds that rob sports of their authenticity.

Caputo, though, had an idea for how to inject some authenticity into the inauthentic. For several years, he and his crew have been collecting sounds from the crowds at every NFL stadium with the intent to add it to various productions from the NFL. With hundreds of clips at his disposal, he wondered whether they might be the answer.

“We had it catalogued,” Caputo said. “And the need came along: What are we going to do without fans?”
What does baseball sound like during a pandemic? Loneliness — and hope.

Caputo didn’t know how to deploy them until he turned to Robert Brock, director of education at the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences in Tempe, Ariz. For decades, Brock has trained audio technicians and engineers, with many recent students going on to work on video games. In 2006, Brock began working with a new software program called Wwise, which helps bring video game series such as Assassin’s Creed to aural life.

If Caputo’s work at NFL Films work is linear — he adds sound to a finished video product after the fact — what Brock could do with Wwise was something more advanced: adding scripted audio reactions to unpredictable events in real time.

They went to work. Caputo and his team combed through the NFL’s audio clips and isolated crowd noise from every stadium, filtering out the public address announcer and music. Brock categorized them, sorting them into positive and negative reactions from the home crowd with four intensity settings for each — low, medium, high and peak.

For instance: a four-yard run by Saquon Barkley is a low positive reaction from New York Giants fans. A first down pass by Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay probably would earn a medium positive response. But if Tom Brady throws a game-winning touchdown pass to Rob Gronkowski in Tampa Bay, cue the peak setting. There are also four different settings for the crowd noise that builds before every play, denoted by levels 1, 2, 3 and “raucous,” which would be used, for example, on fourth and one with the home team’s defense on the field in the fourth quarter.

There are the clips for boos, too, which Caputo said would not be deployed for poor play but only for an obviously bad call. Certain stadium soundtracks picked up more boos than others, he said. (One of those stadiums, yes, was Philadelphia’s.) There is even separate sound for when a player suffers an injury.
“We don’t want inappropriate crowd sounds if there’s a guy down,” Brock said. “So those are just very neutral ambient elements.”
THE REST OF THE STORY
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I personally think it's pretty lame and cheesy. We can see the stands are empty during the games where no spectators are allowed. Makes me feel like I'm playing Tecmo Bowl on my 13 inch TV when I was seven years old.
 
CloakNNNdagger said:
Watched Seattle safety Marquise Blair's video.................looks like another ACL. As usual, will need to wait for official word.
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**************************************************************
Seahawks' Marquise Blair: Suffers torn ACL
By RotoWire Staff
28 mins ago

Blair tore his ACL during Sunday's win over the Patriots and will miss the rest of the season, John Boyle of the Seahawks' official site reports.

While making a tackle Sunday night, Blair's leg bent awkwardly, and he was quickly ruled out of the game. He'll undergo surgery to repair his torn ACL, but he should have ample time to recover before the 2021 season. The 2019 second-round pick will likely be replaced by Ugo Amadi as the team's nickel safety, although Lano Hill could rotate in occasionally as well.
****************************************************************
.........................ACL #16
 
There's an explanation for why any final word on some 49ers major injuries have not been reported. The 49ers are staying at The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia between their games in New York, and had an MRI truck scheduled to arrive for further examination of their injured players, but it broke down.

If that wasn't enough, the truck issue compounded a trip fraught with problems, which began with a 6-hour delay on the runway before departing San Jose on Friday night due to a vehicle crashing into the team plane. San Francisco arrived to the team hotel at 4 a.m. ET on Saturday as a result of the delay.
 
gwallaia said:
Is there any physical conditioning that players can do to help prevent ACL injuries?
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The ACL ruptures are felt to be due in large part to weakness and imbalance of the quadriceps and hamstring muscles not being able to overcome the ground reaction forces. When the muscles and ligaments are stressed, they respond by repairing and strengthening. When there is no proper formal real-time conditioning periods [the lack of offseason formal training / lack of OTAs, minicamps, TC preseason games] and lack of full contact practicing, ligaments and their joint-stabilizing muscles cannot be expected to all of a sudden become strong for the regular season. This was exemplified with the CBA 2013 short-preparation, mandated severely decreased number and hours of practices allowed.........especially contact practices...............ACLs [along with other soft tissue injuries] sky-rocketted. The players keep wanting and negotiating less and less supervised coaching/weight training time, and noncontact and contact practices in return for increased pay. Things don't usually work that way..........and they haven't worked out as well as many players might have thought.
 
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To put things into a little perspective, the number of torn ACL’s sustained last year before the start of the regular season (mini camps, practices & preseason) was 13.................this grossly foreshortened pre-regular season year, it was 9.
 
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On TV it is hard to believe it isn’t real. I think it helps motivate the team in a way that an empty stadium with echos can’t.
texan279 said:
I noticed that some of the games had stadium/crowd noise being played/piped in. Pretty cheesy IMO...
Click to expand...
 
texan279 said:
I noticed that some of the games had stadium/crowd noise being played/piped in. Pretty cheesy IMO...
Click to expand...

I agree completely. The audio mix on Sunday night's game was so stupid that I had a hard time hearing the announcers during some parts of the game. It annoyed me that it was all fake and did not have to be that way. Yeah, I get it, Seattle's home stadium is loud, but it just felt forced and disingenuous for a broadcast from an empty stadium.

So I turned it off and found something better to do that did not annoy me.
 
Double Barrel said:
I agree completely. The audio mix on Sunday night's game was so stupid that I had a hard time hearing the announcers during some parts of the game. It annoyed me that it was all fake and did not have to be that way. Yeah, I get it, Seattle's home stadium is loud, but it just felt forced and disingenuous for a broadcast from an empty stadium.

So I turned it off and found something better to do that did not annoy me.
Click to expand...

There was a game on Sunday night?
 
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