Handling Crowd Noise and Getting The Play Off

I'm expecting a loud crowd on Sunday. The Hawks offense rarely has to deal with crowd noise when we play on the road. Given the amount of time Russ likes to take at the line pre-snap and the issues we've had with the play clock, I'm hoping that hand signals and crowd noise considerations are part of our prep this week.

Timeouts will be valuable in this one. Don't burn them due to play clock and noise issues please.

Go Hawks.

I think the issue in Minnesota was the shear ability to even talk in the cold had something to do with it and probably a part of the reason we took all those early time outs.

In general though, one of the reasons I believe we are playing better on the road (not sure why this season as opposed to others though...scheme?) is the defense is able to communicate better on the field when the opposing O is on the field.

Another side benefit I had just thought of was...our O actually gets to talk and strategize on the sideline when the crowd is more quiet when their team is on offense. Again...not sure the correlation this year as opposed to others, but it would make some sense why we seemed to have struggled a little at home and doing well on the road...

I know this doesn't mean much when it come to the communication at the line, but still something that I had been thinking about related to the noise.

Hmmmm....I guess I was on to something! :mrgreen:
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/14576 ... nthers-nfl

Their crowd doesn't have a reputation for being noisy.

The home crowd won't make much difference

They may have had equipment problems due to the cold in Minnesota....I was there and my Iphone froze up and shutdown about 10 minutes into the game....