Remember Fred Toucher?

He’s the Boston radio host who hung up on the Carolina Hurricanes beat reporter because he didn’t like the guy’s accent.

Toucher hosts mornings on The Sports Hub 98.5 alongside some guy named Rich Shertenlieb. During Monday’s show, they talked about the Eagles/Patriots game and shared speculation via the station’s color analyst that the Birds were actually pumping artificial crowd noise through the speakers on Sunday night.

This blurb is in the NBC Sports Boston write-up:


Philadelphia Eagles fans gave Tom Brady and the New England Patriots an expectedly rude welcome Sunday at Lincoln Financial Field.

But did “The Linc” take matters into its own hands to make that welcome a little more rude?

As Brady took the field for the Patriots’ first drive, 98.5 The Sports Hub color analyst Scott Zolak made an interesting observation on the radio broadcast: From his vantage point in the booth, it sounded like the Eagles were pumping in artificial crowd noise.

Hmm.. Not sure I’ve ever heard that accusation leveled against the Eagles. The Linc is organically pretty loud.

Here’s a clip going around:

That’s from the TV broadcast, so a director could have simply turned the field mics up or adjusted the crowd noise in the audio mix. You’d need some raw b-roll with natural sound to get a better idea of what was going on.

For what it’s worth, Tom Brady said he didn’t notice anything:

“I didn’t notice, but again, those are not the things I would notice. Loud is loud. At one point when you can’t hear, basically it’s like ‘loud’ and then ‘louder,’ but you’re really not going to notice the difference much.”

Brady and the Patriots offense also rely on silent snap counts and hand signals during road games, so if there was some extra crowd noise, he wasn’t rattled by it.

“Once it’s to the point where we have non-verbal communication, it kind of is what it is,” Brady said.

Toucher and Rich talk about the speculation below at the 27:55 mark. They play some clips off the radio broadcast for examples (29:45 is a good place to pick it up). If you were at the game, tell me if there’s something to it, or if this is fake news: