NFL owners say grass vs. turf debate isn’t as clear as NFLPA claims

In September, after New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers tore his Achilles in the first drive of the season, NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell released a statement about NFL playing surfaces, saying: “Moving all stadium fields to high-quality natural grass surfaces is the easiest decision the NFL can make.”

Howell took office in June and wrote that during his short time in the role, the issue of artificial turf “has been near the top of the players’ list during my team visits and one I have raised with the NFL.”

There’s no end in sight for the turf versus grass debate. Just last week, Buffalo Bills players ripped the artificial turf in London.

There have been several recent studies that show that turf causes more lower-body injuries than natural grass, and the NFLPA finds that research significant. The NFL and NFLPA share the same injury information and a CBA-mandated committee on field surface safety and performance, but the NFL has not taken the hard-line stance on the data that the NFLPA has, and has pointed out that some turf fields have a lower injury rate than some grass fields.

So unsurprisingly, for NFL owners attending the fall league meetings in New York City, the issue isn’t as black and white as the NFLPA makes it out to be.

Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said he’s never given a thought to having natural grass at AT&T Stadium, which is an indoor venue that wasn’t built to accommodate the grass setup that the Arizona Cardinals and the Las Vegas Raiders indoor stadiums employ, where they roll the grass in for games and out to grow in the sunshine afterward.

“We don’t think we can have a quality natural grass in our stadium,” Jones said. “If you’ve got indoor stadiums, it’s just very difficult if you don’t plan on the front end, like an Arizona did, to roll the grass in. And then sometimes they get criticized for the condition of the field because it doesn’t grow as well as if they were growing it full time out there. There’s a lot of moving parts.”

Jones is also a member of the league’s competition committee, which means he’s taken a close look at the data on injuries on turf versus grass and doesn’t think it’s significant.

“I just think the data, you always want it to be perfect,” Jones said. “It’s a little more (injuries on turf) by a minuscule, there may be a couple more injuries that we do study our turf and what we’re doing there, and I think they get better every year. I know the league helps fund the research on this and how we can make these fields better.”

Jones said Cowboys players ask to practice on grass during the week, and Dallas has natural grass practice fields but said he’s never had a player ask him to switch the stadium turf to grass.

“We’ve never lost a player who says ‘Oh, well, I’m gonna go to another team where I’m playing on grass,’” Jones said. “You got to play half the games on the road. So I’m sure that that plays into some of it too.”

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Which NFL stadiums have artificial turf and which have grass?

Panthers owner David Tepper has heard directly from players who have asked him to switch the Bank of America stadium back to grass. In 2021, Tepper switched the stadium from grass to turf because he landed a Major League Soccer expansion team that would play there, and he wanted to host more concerts there. Former Panthers wide receiver D.J. Moore said last season that team leaders asked Tepper to bring back grass.

On his way out the door of the Intercontinental hotel in Manhattan on Wednesday, Tepper told The Athletic that whenever the NFL and the NFLPA make policy regarding playing surfaces, he’ll adjust, and he’s anxious to see safe and consistent surfaces across the league.

The Minnesota Vikings will be switching to monofilament turf from the current slit film this coming offseason, a decision that Vikings owner/EVP Jonathan Wilf said came in part from the Vikings’ internal review process and also from the NFL’s goal for playing surface consistency. Last November, the NFLPA called for an immediate ban on all slit film turf.

“I know that there’s been a lot of discussions about just having a uniform surface so there’s more consistency from field to field,” Wilf said. “So not one turf that feels harder than another turf, or one slicker than another turf.”

NFL executive VP of communications, public affairs and policy Jeff Miller said the league doesn’t have a specific regulation on the type of playing surfaces — whether that’s slit film turf, monofilm turf, hybrid or natural grass, but that conversations with the NFLPA and joint research between the league and the player’s union are constantly evolving.

“The goal needs to be to limit the number of different sorts of surfaces that our clubs play on,” Miller said. “So when [a player] steps on a field in one city that is going to feel very similar to the surface that he steps on in different cities so it doesn’t feel hard or soft, or slick, or sticky.”

Miller said the league regularly shares injury data with clubs and makes recommendations. He said that sometimes, an inconsistent grass surface could have more injury data than a turf surface. Miller used the Tennessee Titans as an example because the team switched from natural grass to turf for this season at Nissan Stadium. Miller said the injury data on Tennessee’s natural grass playing surface supported the move to turf, a more controllable surface that modeled reduced injury data. The Titans team website reported that based on data from the 2018-21 seasons, Nissan Stadium had a higher number of lower extremity injuries than each of the monofilament synthetic turfs in the league.

“From an injury rate perspective, that was a logical decision for that club,” Miller said. “You need to look at each individual circumstance.”

Raiders owner Mark Davis recently built a new stadium when his team moved to Las Vegas, and grass was at the top of his list of priorities.

“That was something that I specifically had to have, was grass for safety purposes,” Davis said. “The Raiders were not going to play on astroturf. It just didn’t make sense. And so the Arizona Cardinals and the Bidwills had the guts to try it in their stadium, with the tray, and we learned from them and took it to the next level. There’s just no way that we were going to go play on turf.”

Davis said he wished all NFL teams would move to grass, but he also acknowledged the difficulties and cost of growing it in certain Northern climates with outdoor stadiums.

“But it’s possible because I’ve seen them take indoor arenas or indoor stadiums and roll grass in for soccer, so they can bring it in on a game-by-game basis,” Davis said. “That’s an expense, but that would be something I believe that would have to be collectively bargained. And I don’t know where that would go. But for me, grass was No. 1.”

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(Photo: Charles LeClaire / USA Today)