Section four twelve

I have had these seats nine years. They are up high and off the corner and I love them and I am not giving them up. But I want to describe something that I think the club has never fully sat with, which is that my father in law, on his couch, in his sweatpants, has a materially better understanding of the game than I do.

He gets a play by play guy and a color guy. He gets the replay four times from three angles. He gets somebody telling him it was a hold on the right guard, number 74, and here is why, and here is what that means for the drive. He gets told when a guy is hurt and how badly and whos going in for him.

I get a PA announcer reading the tackle and a videoboard that shows me a replay if the club feels like showing me that replay, which they notably do not when its close. Half of section four twelve is looking at their phone trying to figure out what the flag was. We are all in a building we paid to be in, holding phones, trying to find out what just happened forty yards in front of us.

So they started selling a pass for the radio call and I bought it the day it went up and I would have paid three times what they charged. One earbud in, one out, so I have still got the stadium in one ear — and that is the actual right way to do it, by the way, because the whole point of being there is the noise. But now the noise has a narrator.

It is under a second behind. Its not the broadcast delay you are bracing for. Everybody makes a big deal of that and it is a non issue if you are using one ear for the room and one for the call, which is how everybody in my section ended up doing it without anybody telling them to. Where it would be weird is if you were trying to sync it exactly to what your eyes are seeing, and after about ten minutes you stop noticing entirely.

The thing I did not expect: my section got louder and smarter. When something happens, six of us know why now instead of zero, and it propogates down the row in about four seconds. There is a guy two rows down who has become the unofficial explainer for everybody who didnt buy one. I keep telling him he should be charging.