Bill compton cardboard cutout9/17/2023 In 2019, he announced Baltimore’s selection of guard Ben Powers with the no. Gaba, who was blind for much of his life and battled cancer four times, was a frequent caller to Baltimore sports radio stations and a regular presence at home games. The Ravens hosted more than 4,000 cutouts during the 2020 season, several of which honored beloved superfan Mo Gaba, who died last July at the age of 14. The South Park cutouts, however, were returned to Comedy Central and the Broncos kept several cutouts of celebrities, thereby proving once again that fame will get you anywhere in this country. Fans were not able to get their cutouts back due to storage and distribution challenges. The Broncos had more than 5,000 cardboard fans at Mile High Stadium last season, though that count included nearly 2,000 cutouts of South Park characters (the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are Broncos fans and based the animated series in a fictional town in Colorado). Washington also offered in-stadium or by-mail pickup for its 2,196 cutout fans and has stored those left unclaimed by their friends and family at the stadium. The Lions ran a similar cutout reunion program, as did the Patriots for the 900 cutouts of health care workers who watched New England’s Week 16 home game against the Bills from the south end zone. Two-dimensional Tim McGraw will surely roam the bowels of Nissan Stadium for years to come, but for now, he and others like him are stored in the office of the team’s director of ticket services, Stephanie Atkins, who has graciously welcomed their company. A few cutouts, mostly of former Titans players and celebrity fans, were kept in-house for eventual display. The Titans told me they sold about 750 cutouts for placement during home games last season and that they gave fans who bought them the opportunity to pick them up or have them shipped to them after the playoffs. But after the game ended, what happened to cardboard Grandma? Well, we set off to find out.įive Takeaways From the Julio Jones Trade For the Super Bowl, at 65,618-seat Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, the NFL sold 30,000 cardboard cutout fans to sit alongside the 25,000 socially distanced fans who were allowed to attend the game between the Chiefs and Buccaneers. For a price of around $100, depending on the team, fans could send a photo and have a cutout of their choosing placed in a seat for a game. Eventually, teams allowed fans to purchase their own cutouts of themselves, family members, friends, or even their pets, with proceeds usually benefiting team charitable foundations. Cutouts made of stiff cardboard featuring the torsos of players or celebrities were placed in seats to represent those who once filled those chairs with actual human butts and to fill empty space on TV broadcasts. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the NFL and other sports leagues to restrict or eliminate fan attendance, some teams decided to use corrugated likenesses as a stand-in for a live audience. Among them: tens of thousands of the NFL’s most rabid fans, replicated in cardboard form. Certain items, however, will be jettisoned to make way for those returning. That means roaring crowds, game-day traffic, and long beer lines will be back. The NFL believes the lone exception, the Colts, is on track to be cleared by Indianapolis authorities. All but one of 32 teams have been cleared for full stadium capacity beginning with the preseason in August. The start of the 2021 NFL season will be notable, mostly, for what returns with it. A cutout of Senator Bernie Sanders at the Super Bowl Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for TW There was Grandma, holding her perch atop one of the red folding seats in the lower bowl of Raymond James Stadium Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, wearing mittens and a winter coat, peering quizzically down at the 50-yard line someone’s goldendoodle, next to a baby, next to a man in red body paint, next to … Jay Leno? They were all lined up like the characters from an abandoned game of Guess Who? waiting for someone to come and collect them. The game ended, the teams left the field, and half of the crowd remained in the stands. Super Bowl LV in February, however, was different. Typically, these remains are easy to ignore in the game’s aftermath and are forgotten as participants and fans stream out of the stadium in jubilation or grief until the cleanup crew arrives to erase any sign of the previous proceedings. Bands of athletic tape layered nearly as thick as a phone book are sliced off players’ wrists and ankles and then discarded onto locker room floors. Confetti swirls through the air like a school of fish through water, then coats the ground. Every year, the Super Bowl finishes in a flurry of detritus.
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