Indiana Football: How no fans at football games would affect Hoosiers
By Adam Childs
The Indiana football team is gearing up (virtually) for the 2020 season with the possibility of no fans. How does that affect the Hoosiers?
There aren’t any college football fans that want the 2020 season to be played without fans in the stands, but if the alternative is no football they will gladly take it. It will be a strange season if that happens, but one that would hopefully allow a full schedule to be played by all the schools.
The lack of fans at games will hurt some schools more than others. There are a lot of schools that have a very distinct home-field advantage because of the noise their fans make.
It is also very intimidating to walk into a stadium with over 100,000 fans in the stands, which is exactly what happens when Big Ten teams face when traveling to Ohio State, Penn State, and Michigan.
The SEC might be hurt the most by no fans as they have some of the loudest stadiums in the country in Tennessee, Alabama, Auburn, Florida, and Texas A&M just to name a few. But that doesn’t mean the Big Ten can’t be imposing also.
Ohio State and Michigan could benefit from no fans early as they head out west to play Oregon and Washington respectively. Both of those places, especially Autzen Stadium (home of the Ducks) are extremely loud and are tough for any team to win at.
It will affect each team differently, some positively and some negatively. Let’s reiterate that even though this might help teams traveling to some stadiums, not having fans in the stands stinks and we can’t wait until everything is back to normal.
But this is the situation we are in right now and it is something that will be talked about. So how does this affect the Hoosiers? For some games it won’t matter much at all, for others it will be a huge deal.
So let’s take a dive into what games it won’t matter much and which games it will help the Hoosiers.