When thinking of turf fields or natural grass fields, some National Football League (NFL) fans will side with the owners and back turf. However, most fans side with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) who claim that turf causes more injuries.
Players claim grass is better for safety reasons, but owner’s argue that turf fields are just as safe as the grass.
Studies by the IQIVA (A medical data science company used by the NFL for injury rates) show that players are 28% more likely to obtain a non-contact lower extremity injury on artificial turf than on natural grass and 32% more likely to suffer a non-contact knee or ankle injury on turf.
Another study by the IQIVA showed that in 2022, the rate for noncontact lower-extremity injuries on artificial turf rose to a rate of .048 per 100. The corresponding rate on grass was 0.035.
“I believe that we — and all teams — should be playing on grass. This is an age-old issue, and I believe the time to address the problem is now! Let’s have the conversation,” Los Angeles Rams receiver Cooper Kupp stated in a tweet on November 15, 2022.
In this season alone, the NFL has lost several key players such as Aaron Rodgers, Justin Jefferson, Matt Milano, Tre’davious White, Mike Evans, and Mike Williams due to non-contact injuries on turf. The players have started to question the NFL more and more about what they are doing to solve this issue.
“This is two weeks in a row we’ve had players get injured on turf fields. I think it’s time y’all take some of the money y’all make off us and invest in grass fields for every team around the league,” Green Bay Packers linebacker De’Vondre Campbell stated in a tweet last season.
One main reason for non-contact injuries on turf is that synthetic surfaces, such as turf, tend to have less give, which causes knees, feet, and ankles to absorb the force, and makes injuries more likely to happen.
Former Browns player and NFLPA president JC Tretter recently wrote an article on the NFLPA website explaining the problems with artificial turf and why changing all fields in the NFL to natural grass would be beneficial.
“Once I started experiencing both surfaces interchangeably, I began to understand exactly why my teammates disliked the practices on turf. Whenever I practiced on an artificial field surface, my joints felt noticeably stiffer the next day. The unforgiving nature of artificial turf compounds the grind on the body we already bear from playing a contact sport,” Tretter stated in the article.
Tretter also claimed that in week 16, after a league standard pre-game field test failed at Charlotte’s Bank Of America Stadium, the NFL still allowed the game to be played. Tretter claimed that the league informed the NFLPA that the field had reached acceptable playing conditions late in the first half.
“But the fact remains that the players in that game had to play on a field that the league acknowledges was not safe,” Tretter said.
The NFLPA’s new executive, Lloyd Howell, also called for the NFL to use natural grass in all NFL stadiums on September 13, 2023, after The New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers went down with an achilles injury, keeping him out for the remainder of the season.
Artificial turf supporters argue that costs for keeping up natural grass are more expensive than artificial turf as the average cost to maintain grass in the NFL is $18,000 – $44,000; meanwhile, for a turf field, the cost is only $6,000-$10,000.
Even though this point has already been disproven as according to sportsvenuecalculator.com, a website that provides comprehensive information on sports venue costs, the cost of a ten-year life cycle span for an artificial turf field in the NFL is between $1,170,000 and $2,070,000, whereas for a natural grass field, the cost is between $730,000 and $1,560,000.
Overall, the NFL should turn away from having turf fields for any stadium because grass is more cost-efficient, safer for players, and easier to maintain, and if they care about the safety of their players as much as they say they do, they should switch to turf players to at least save some of the non-contact injuries from happening.
