49ers vs. Cowboys: When Cowboy Fans Invade

When individual tickets were on sale shortly after the lockout ended, it was interesting to note that San Francisco 49ers tickets were among the top sellers. There were rumors floating around back when tickets went on sale that Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants fans were buying up a lot of the tickets once they knew football was back and they could make travel plans.

Well, yesterday we got some kind of answer on that. Although Candlestick Park wasn't jam-packed with Cowboys fans, based solely on the noise level and chants, you would have thought you were at Cowboys Stadium. There were reports earlier this week hat Jim Harbaugh was pumping in some noise at practice. He claimed it was for the defense in case it got noisy, but I'm guessing Harbaugh also had an idea that maybe it would not be quite the normal home field advantage.

It's obviously disappointing when your home turf is overrun by opposing fans. I can't complain too much because I certainly wasn't in attendance. Personally, I prefer watching the games on TV and often spend my Sundays watching the games from home. I do it in part because I'm posting new threads here, but it's also because I have a certain comfort level.

Nonetheless it's disheartening to see that. I don't know whether that impacted the outcome of the game. Home field advantage in football is a bit of a mixed bag. Travel plays a big part, but I often wonder how much fans impact it. In excessively noisy games it can definitely impact the game when it leads to false starts and force a team to use timeouts. However, while yesterday's game was loud, it was not false start/forced timeouts loud as far as I could tell.

Aside from maybe being a little annoying to the players, did it really make much of a difference?