FanPost

The Last Word on the Loudest Fans

Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports

It was October 7, 1991, and the 3-2 Kansas City Chiefs were facing the 5-0 Buffalo Bills at Arrowhead Stadium. It had been eight long years since the Chiefs had hosted a Monday Night Football game, and while the Bills were favored by 3, even some national pundits had picked Marty Shottenheimer's resurgent Chiefs to topple the powerful Buffalo team coached by Marv Levy - a team that had made the first of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances the previous January.

Thanks to Kansas City fans who realized that by being loud, they could help the suddenly dominant Chiefs defense disrupt opposing offenses, Arrowhead had already been developing a reputation as a difficult place to play. But on that beautiful October night, those raucous Kansas City fans outdid themselves.

I was there. I could feel the upper deck of the stadium trembling beneath my feet as the Chiefs utterly dominated a perennial Super Bowl contender, defeating the Bills 33-6. Arrowhead Stadium - and the Chiefs - had arrived.

Does any of this sound familiar?

***

I wasn't lucky enough to be at Arrowhead on Monday night as another resurgent Chiefs team - with lots of help from their fans - trounced another perennial NFL powerhouse, and reclaimed the world record for crowd noise at an outdoor stadium. Those of you who were there got to experience the same special thrill I did more than two decades ago.

But you missed this TV moment:

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While attending the Chiefs MNF game with your girlfriend who is a Pats fan - and with the Chiefs leading New England 27-0 in the third quarter - silence really IS golden!

***

As you may already know, I make my living as an audio engineer. After Seattle's CenturyLink Stadium reclaimed the world record for crowd noise last season, I wrote an article to explain how sound measurements are made, and how crowd size affects the total noise. My idea was to show that the difference between the three world records set last season - two in Seattle, and one in Kansas City - were, for all practical purposes, equivalent. Most people would never be able to hear a difference of even 1 dB - much less the 0.3 dB that separated the three records.

But today, that is not the case. On Monday night, Chiefs fans eclipsed Seattle's previous record by 4.6 dB. That IS a significant difference - and quite frankly, I was astonished by the new record. Kansas City fans have every reason to be proud of the effort they made - and more importantly, the difference they made in the game. If you were at the stadium, you probably don't yet know that at halftime, ESPN commentator Jon Gruden said that in order to win the game, the Patriots were going to have to adopt a no-huddle offense to score points quickly and keep Kansas City from adjusting its defense. He was right. But New England didn't do it, because they couldn't have sustained a no-huddle offense in Arrowhead Stadium on Monday night any more than the Bills could in October 1991.

In short, Chiefs fans sealed this win.

But we all know what's going to happen next, don't we?

Sometime before the season is over, Seattle fans are going to bring the Guiness guy to the Pacific Northwest for another attempt at the world record. And they might just retake it. If that happens, you're going to continue to hear a lot of people talking about how the design of Seattle's stadium gives them an advantage... or how they used their cellphones to generate additional noise... or how they added amplified sound to the crowd noise. (I'm certain that eventually, black helicopters - or perhaps President Obama - will be involved) You'll hear it everywhere. Hell... late on Monday afternoon, the very nice elderly lady who checked Terri and me out of the Liberty Wal-Mart explained to us in great detail how the Seattle stadium gives them an unfair advantage. We just smiled, picked up our Velveeta, Jimmy Dean sausage and Rotel and went home to watch the game.

During the week leading up to Monday's game, I made a number of comments in various SBNation articles about crowd noise in NFL stadiums, doing my best to discount these largely mythical claims. I'm not going to bore you with any more of that audio gobbledegook right now. I'll simply say this: when you carefully examine the physics involved, you see that the single most important factor in crowd noise is the commitment of the fans. So it is fair to say that Kansas City fans - and Seattle fans - both have a lot invested in helping their teams win. But it's also fair to say that Chiefs fans made a nearly superhuman effort on Monday night!

Having said that, now I'm going to take off the sweat stained, dog-eared NASA ball cap that I like to wear when I'm mixing live sound, and put on my Chiefs ball cap.

You see... after arguing about it all week, I have come to realize that these myths about Seattle's "advantages" are persistent because Chiefs fans want them to be true. No Chiefs fan thinks those upstart fans in Seattle deserve the record, because in the NFL, Chiefs fans did it first, did it best, and did it all on their own. Here in Kansas City, the team never had to mount a PR campaign designating its fans as the "12th Man," or create a flag to be raised in a ceremony before each home game. Our fans created this culture all on our own. We invented it. We were the best at it. And we didn't need to hold the world record to prove it, either. We knew we were the best because of what happened on what Chiefs broadcaster Mitch Holthus calls the "sacred acre" of Arrowhead Stadium.

It's entirely possible that Seattle - or maybe some other NFL city - will make an effort to retake this record. And maybe they'll succeed. But I don't care about the record any more - and neither should you - because now and forever, every NFL fanbase that takes matters into their own hands on their home field owes Kansas City fans for showing them how it's done.

No Englishman in a cute little coat and an SPL meter can ever take that away from us.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of Arrowhead Pride's writers or editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of Arrowhead Pride writers or editors.