Dylan Sampson alleges playing in opposing stadium with piped-in crowd noise

Josh Heupel addressed the accusation of Tennessee having to pump crowd noise into Neyland Stadium during Saturday’s 24-17 win over Alabama — and his star running back is backing his head coach.

In fact, Dylan Sampson said there doesn’t need to be noise pumped through the speakers. The 101,915 fans inside the stadium over the weekend were more than enough to satisfy any lack of noise.

“First of all there’s definitely no crowd noise being pumped into Neyland. That’s just, you know, really credit to our fans,” Sampson told Paul Finebaum on Wednesday. “That’s just how loud Neyland Stadium gets because they think we’re pumping crowd noise. You know, I’ve been at places where they pump crowd noise, so I know what that sounds like.

“But it’s just pure chaos. From first to third down, fourth down. You know, your ears are ringing. You even go back and watch the film from Florida, and bam, but there’s a there are periods when like, the camera is shaking — the film camera is shaken because Neyland gets so loud. So that’s a credit to our fans for showing up and showing out because they definitely have a huge impact on the game. We’re going to need them to continue doing that.”

This is refering to Alabama radio broadcaster Chris Stewart saying that the Vols “got 100,000-plus [fans] and they also pipe in crowd noise as well,” during the game on Saturday while doing play-by-play on the Crimson Tide Sports Network’s broadcast.

Heupel gave his two cents on the matter during his weekly Wednesday press conference.

“Neyland doesn’t need anything fake piped into the stadium for that to be the loudest place in America,” Heupel said. “Hopefully our fans take that personally, enjoy this bye week and come back and be louder than ever next time we’re at home.”

The Vols are idle in Week 9, but host Kentucky inside Neyland Stadium the following week.