The Los Angeles Rams may have been playing at home during Thursday night’s season-opening game against the Buffalo Bills. But with all the Bills fans filling the SoFi Stadium stands, it felt more like a road game with all the crowd noise.
Perhaps making it even more embarrassing, Los Angeles star quarterback Matthew Stafford revealed that the team was actually expecting the crowd noise at home – they even practiced for it.
“No, we prepared for it,” Stafford told reporters after the game, according to Pro Football Talk. “We were prepared to be on the silent count at home again, but it wasn’t something that we haven’t done before.”
Stafford could be referring to any number of past games that had a visitor-heavy crowd, but one game against the San Francisco 49ers stands out, because Stafford’s wife, Kelly, even noticed the effect the visiting crowd had on her husband’s team.
“I’ve never seen so many of the opposing team’s fans at a game, and we came from Detroit,” Kelly Stafford said last year, according to Pro Football Talk. “Matthew was on a silent count, Jimmy Garoppolo was not. . . . It was crazy. Again, I’ve never seen anything like that but it made it very hard for us, because I guess we weren’t expecting to be on silent count.”
Stafford better get used to it, because there’s a strong chance he’ll be dealing with home crowd noise again this season.
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