The Buffalo Bills are preparing to play the Kansas City Chiefs this weekend in the AFC Championship game, which features the two top seeds from the AFC conference.
The Bills will head to Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, known as one of the nost inhospitable stops for visiting teams.
In a recent poll by ESPN, 111 current NFL players ranked the most difficult stadium in which to play. Unfortunately for the Buffalo Bills, the number one vote-getter – by far – was Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium. Shannon Sharpe shared some of his own personal experience playing there:
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There’s no place like Arrowhead.
Not a single stadium has the at atmosphere that we have in Kansas City. pic.twitter.com/vLGhYcfeLx
— fatty patty (@theonlydyl_) January 14, 2025
So what makes Arrowhead, well, Arrowhead?
Start with the least of a teams worries but annoying nonetheless: the visitor’s lockerroom is tiny. You put 53 huge men plus coaches and staff in a cramped lockerrroom – not comfortable at all.
But according to the ESPN poll, it’s what happens when the players leave that lockerroom that can really affect the outcome of the game. A sign will greet the Bills players and coaches as they make their way to the field: “Welcome to Arrowhead — The Loudest Stadium in the World — 142.2 DB” That is loud. Jet-engine loud. In 2014, the decibal level – 142.2 – set a Guinness World Record for the loudest crowd noise ever at a sporting event in a victory over the Patriots – a record Tom Brady didn’t love.
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So what might the Bills do to combat this ear-splitting wall of sound created by the bowl-seating, steep decks and crazy fans called “Chiefs Kingdom”?
One, they’ll pipe crowd noise into practice all week to get the players and coaches used to it on another level. They’ll blast music and Chiefs Kingdom chants that the team will hear in the stadium. The Bills players will also rely on using hand signals to communicate, particularly on offense. Or, as Bills TE Dawson Knox noted in 2022, lip reading.
As Josh Allen said in 2022 in an interview with NFL Network’s Kyle Brandt about playing at Arrowhead, “It can go one of two ways, right? It can be the loudest stadium that you’ll ever be in or it can be the quietest stadium you’ll ever be in. It’s this cool mix and match. If you do your job and you can go out there and win a football game, the satisfaction that you get from [it is great].”
JOSH ALLEN in The Basement 💥
-Returning to Arrowhead
-Is it loudest stadium in NFL?
-Lot of thoughtful talk on Mahomes
-His review of The Fugitive 🎥RIGHT HERE: https://t.co/B396iT7u9L pic.twitter.com/YOS3vM22JQ
— Kyle Brandt (@KyleBrandt) October 11, 2022
Come Sunday’s AFC Championship game, the question is not whether the Chiefs fans will have Arrrowhead rockin’, it’s whether Allen and the Bills can pull off the plays that bring silence to the NFL’s most difficult place to play.
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Brooke PryorFeb 7, 2025, 09:46 AM ETCloseBrooke Pryor is a reporter for NFL Nation at ESPN who has covered the Pittsburgh Steelers since 2019. She previously co