It’s not just the Buffalo Bills: Goo Goo Dolls’ Robby Takac on how crowd noise rocks

I was standing in the team’s postgame news conference room a couple of weeks ago after the team’s runaway win over the Miami Dolphins. Stefon Diggs, who scored three touchdowns (and after one of them, grabbed some fans’ beers and smashed them in celebration), talked about how much the loud fans helped. “We need that,” he said.

Later, head coach Sean McDermott – with no prompting – echoed his star receiver, likening the crowd’s volume to “jet engines.”

I wrote a piece exploring why crowd noise matters (“It’s an emotional amplifier,” performance coach Steve Magness told me) and explaining how the Bills plan to jack up the volume in their future stadium.

But I suspected this isn’t just a sports dynamic, and so I called someone who has the other type of job that involves constant crowd feedback: a rock star.

“I can’t catch, throw or kick a ball, but I would assume that the crowd and the energy that’s in the room is as much of a motivator as anything else,” said Goo Goo Dolls bassist Robby Takac, who lives in his native Buffalo and understands the Bills fandom. “When you’re in front of 10,000, screaming people, there’s some energy behind that for us. It elevates your performance, and I’m sure it’s the same way with sports.”

Takac and Goos frontman John Rzeznik have been performing for crowds measuring in the tens of thousands since the 1990s, when their hit single “Name” gave them a name, and then their smash “Iris” catapulted them to stardom.

Here are excerpts of my conversation with Takac, lightly edited for clarity and space:

What is your song that gets the crowd most engaged? Can you pin it to one? Or two?

Takac: Well, “Iris” is a huge song for us, obviously. Everybody knows that. “Slide” is a huge song for us.

“Slide” is the one I’m thinking, because it would make people…