Honestly though, even with the pumped in noise, is it louder than Arrowhead stadium?
It's an issue, but not that great IMO. There are plenty of loud venues in the NFL.
The point you bring up is valid. There's some question about whether the punishment should be associated with how USEFUL the cheating is, or should it be more based on the intentions of the club that engaged in cheating.
The precedent in my opinion with Spygate is that the punishment is more directly tied to the intentions rather than the effect on the game. There has never been any good evidence that the Patriots' taping of hand signals was of any use whatsover, since those hand signals are often changed quarter-by-quarter, let alone game-to-game. It was certainly never something that could become useful in-game, though we all tried to come up with implausible scenarios whereby the film could be cut up in time to use it after halftime. Nearly all football people who have experience with this stuff weighed in and said it wouldn't have really helped the Patriots much.
But they lost a 1st round pick anyway and it was because of how intentional and elaborate the whole thing was. To have a guy sneaking to a spot with a camera and filming, and to ignore repeated warnings by the NFL that no team is allowed to do this, the whole thing was so willful that Goodell stripped them of a 1st round pick.
That's the same deal here with the crowd noise. EVERYONE knows this is illegal. Everyone knows this is cheating. And it's immediately intuitive how this could be considered helpful on a football field. There's no guessing game like with the filming of the hand signals. By doing it anyway, you're levying a direct challenge at the integrity of the game. That's why the whole thing needs to result in a righteous smiting.
Letting them off easy would be akin to telling the rest of the league, especially dome teams, go ahead and pump in crowd noise, not really a big deal. We're just going to take some mid or late round pick from you IF we catch you, which we probably won't.
