The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has limited the presence of fans inside football stadiums for the upcoming season. Despite the mandate, the Dallas Cowboys will still be allowing fans in the stands at their home stadium.

Their away games will be a different scenario though because several other NFL teams have already announced that they will play in front of empty bleachers. The Cowboys will still have to get used to the fake atmosphere either way.

Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy chimed in on the matter that they have to deal with in the upcoming season:

“It’s league-mandated,”  he said. “They’re trying to pull all the football criteria together for the regular-season games. It seems like they’re not settled on a decibel level – a level of noise – so I was kind of waiting to see exactly how loud it was going to be, particularly the crowd noise that’s going to be the same in every stadium. So that’s a pretty accurate example of what to expect.”

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“There’s a reason for it, and we’ll be fine,” McCarthy said before later adding, “It’s just not real. I don’t know what you thought of it. You play in stadiums throughout your career and some stadiums have really bad fake crowd noise and some are better than others. You do this long enough, you know what it sounds like. It’s just not the real thing.”

The Cowboys recently held their practice at AT&T Stadium on Sunday night with fake crowd noise. It is expected to be set in the 70 to 85-decibel range. The team still has two weeks to prepare and get used to the new normal of football starting on Week 1 against the Los Angeles Rams.

Despite the odd circumstances, the league will have to push through with the fake crowd noise in order to ensure the safety of the fans while still creating a game-like atmosphere in the stadium.