Calls Grow To Bring Back Grass as Turf Monster Claims Another NFL Star

The New York Football Giants’s star receiver, Malik Nabers, will be watching the rest of the NFL season on crutches after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee. It’s the latest such injury on the artificial turf at MetLife Stadium, also home to the New York Jets, spurring a growing cry from the stands to the sidelines: Bring back grass.“Since the start of the 2020 season,” the sports outlet Macara reported on Monday, “at least 15 players” have suffered “injuries to their ACL or Achilles” at East Rutherford, New Jersey’s MetLife. The result was “almost always season ending.”Blame for the scourge has fallen on football’s dreaded “Turf Monster.” Between 2012 and 2018, the NFL’s contact injury rate for lower extremities was 28 percent worse on AstroTurf. Non-contact injuries were 32 percent higher for knees and 69 percent higher for feet and ankles.Hours after Mr. Nabers was carted off the field during Sunday’s game against the San Diego Chargers, a former Giant, Odell Beckham Jr., posted a “Dear NFL” message on X. “We,” he wrote of the NFL, “take all the precautions in the world with EVERYthing else when it comes to players ‘health’ and ‘safety.’”Mr. Beckham abbreviated “please” three times before saying, “Get rid of the,” swearing emoji, “turf.” MetLife, which he called “DeathLife,” “has taken too many talented players away from the game.” He allowed that “it’s not ALL the turf’s fault,” but advocated more “research” to “at least … start the discussion.”While playing at MetLife in 2017, Mr. Beckham broke his ankle. He also tore his left ACL twice, once on the Kentucky Bluegrass at Cleveland and again in a non-contact injury during Super Bowl LVI in 2022 at SoFi Stadium. The Inglewood, California, gridiron was then surfaced with synthetic turf but it’s now testing a hybrid with grass.In 2020, the San Francisco 49ers coach, Kyle Shanahan, tore into MetLife’s turf in post-game remarks after his team sustained injuries including two torn ACLs in a loss to the Jets. “That’s as many knee injuries and ankle stuff,” the coach said, “and people getting caught on the turf as I’ve ever been a part of.”Mr. Shanahan added that for the “entire game,” players talked about “just how sticky the turf was.” The NFL’s inspectors judged the field acceptable, and the following week against the Giants, the coach had no complaints despite losing another player to a leg injury.The Jets’s quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, ruptured an Achilles tendon in his 2023 debut with the team. “Days later,” this columnist wrote in The New York Sun, “the president of the NFL Players Association, Joseph “J.C.” Tretter, renewed his call for natural grass on all game and practice fields.” Mr. Rodgers agreed.In 2023, the president and chief executive of MetLife, Ron VanDeVeen, announced that a “new FieldTurf CORE system” had been installed to address the problem. He envisioned having “one of the premier surfaces in the league,” but the problems persisted.The executive director of the NFL Players Association, Lloyd Howell, wrote in a statement after Mr. Rodgers’s injury that “players overwhelmingly prefer” grass “and the data is clear” that it’s “simply safer.” He said that while switching is expensive, “there is a bigger cost … if we keep losing our best players to unnecessary injuries.”Mr. Howell noted that stadiums “flip to superior grass surfaces” for soccer games as those teams mandate it. He said it “makes no sense” to greenlight the “investment” for those matches while maintaining that “inferior artificial surfaces are acceptable for our own players.”Several NFL stadiums including MetLife will bring in natural grass for the FIFA World Cup next year and then revert to synthetics. Yet pro stadiums at Kansas City, Missouri; Seattle, Washington; Paradise, Nevada, and Miami Gardens, Florida, have ditched artificial turf for good.“My heart hurts for ya,” Mr. Beckham tweeted to Mr. Nabers after his injury. Fans feel sympathy, too, joining players in demanding that the gridiron be made safer. Expect that calls to tackle the Turf Monster will grow with each snapped ligament and ruptured tendon, until the NFL agrees to go back to the future with grass.

Calls Grow To Bring Back Grass as Turf Monster Claims Another NFL Star

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