It’s no secret that NFL players have been pushing to get rid of turf for years, but on Wednesday’s episode of the New Heights podcast, Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce advocated for stadiums to start using real grass for their fields.
The debate of grass over turf reignited at the beginning of the season after New York Jets’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers suffered an Achilles injury. And this week’s discussions of abolishing turf fields comes after Kelce’s brother, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, suffered an ankle injury during a match against the Minnesota Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium.
“My ankle kind of slips for a couple of inches, and then it finally grabs on the turf,” Travis Kelce explained about the incident that caused his right ankle injury. “And that’s been the knock is that when you do slip, you don’t just slip right through the grass.”
Kelce’s injury has been common among other NFL players on turf fields. So much so, the National Football League Players Association has called for grass at all stadiums on more than one occasion. The NFLPA says that players suffered more non-direct contact injuries on turf than natural grass and that football players are ‘significantly safer’ on grass than turf.
So, what could NFL stadiums do in order to avoid injuries on turf? Jason Kelce said it’s as easy as growing your own grass field.
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“We need to get rid of turf altogether,” Jason said on the podcast.
And what about the indoor stadiums, you may ask? Well, he’s got a solution for that, too.
“They’ve got UV lights. You can grow grass inside,” he says firmly. “We can grow grass indoors. All right. I don’t want to hear this nonsense.”
While ultraviolet lights are a perfectly good solution for indoor stadiums, there may be a simpler solution.
Take Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas or State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, for instance. Both are desert stadiums but have installed a retractable field, which allows the grass field to be moved outside for the sunshine and back again for games.
“The roll-out natural grass playing field is contained in a single 40-inch-deep tray measuring 234 feet wide and 403 feet long,” State Farm Stadium said. “Rolling on 546 steel wheels which rest on 13 railroad-like tracks, the field travels the 740 feet inside or out of the stadium.”
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The stadium has a special crew that maintains the grass field to battle the extreme heat and drought.
And even if you can’t successfully grow and upkeep grass, some NFL teams even go so far as having sod shipped in several times per season.
Like all lawn care, temperatures, soil moisture and precipitation are key to properly maintaining grassy surfaces.
And while the Las Vegas and Glendale stadiums may have it easier, cold weather comes at a cost.
It’s estimated a natural grass field could cost a cold-weather team $2 million to $3 million per year to maintain, including $400,000 each time it’s replaced, according to ESPN and a professor of turfgrass research at Michigan State.
Data provided by the National Football League Players Association showed that during the 2022 NFL season, players suffered more non-direct contact injuries on turf than natural grass.
“Grass is a significantly safer surface than turf,” JC Tretter, NFLPA president and author of the online post, said.
The association reviewed past data and found that 10 of the previous 11 years showed a considerably higher injury rate on synthetic versus natural surfaces. The NFLPA noted 2021 was likely an anomaly where the trend flat lined but increased again in 2022.
“Last year, the gap – much like the NFL’s credibility with players on this issue – was as wide as it has ever been, proving that (as the NFLPA suspected) 2021 was, in fact, an outlier,” Tretter wrote.
“The committee, including the NFLPA’s experts, believe that simply playing on natural grass is not the answer to this complex challenge. Some artificial turf surfaces have a lower injury rate than some grass fields, and some grass fields have a lower injury rate than some artificial surfaces,” Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy, said.
Miller went on to say that the league’s goal is to decrease injuries on all surfaces.
“There are no simple answers, but we are committed to the substantial, ongoing work with the players and their expert advisers to make the game safer.”
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Kelce remains questionable for Thursday’s Broncos-Chiefs game in Kansas City. He was a limited participant during the Chiefs’ practice on Tuesday.
Here is a full list of the playing surface for each NFL stadium: