Here’s Two Minutes Of The Sunday Night Football Broadcast Drooling Over An Empty New Stadium

The Rams and Cowboys capped off the first NFL Sunday of the year last night. The game was highly entertaining, since Dallas lost. Malcolm Brown scored a pair of touchdowns for Los Angeles; Ezekiel Elliot had 96 yards and a score for the Cowboys. But the real star of the game, on the TV broadcast, was the Rams' new stadium.

Defector’s Lauren Theisen compiled this two-minute montage of Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth just fawning over this building. (If you can't see the video in the embed, click here.) The over-the-top praise was made funnier because there were no fans in attendance at the stadium last night.

“It definitely turned out to be a palace,” Collinsworth said.

Look, it’s a brand new building. It’s going to be neat. This long Los Angeles Times story does a deep dive into the construction of the $5 billion building that sits at the site of the old Hollywood Park racetrack. "Looking cool" is the bare minimum achievement for a building that cost that much to construct.

But the stadium was empty! How can we even tell if it's any good when fans have yet to experience it? What makes a good stadium great is the atmosphere, and a giant empty stadium might as well be a field in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t really matter what the stadium looks like when it’s empty.

Obviously NBC and its partner, the NFL, want to hype up a stadium the NFL itself is heavily invested in. But a better description of what the game was like in an empty stadium comes from those who actually participated in it. “Eerie is a great way to describe it,” said Rams coach Sean McVay. “It just felt more like a Little League game when I was 6, 7 years old playing,” said the Rams’ Aaron Donald.

Eerie. Little League. These are not the words NBC wanted to use, but they more accurately describe what a football game being played in an empty palace felt like.