The NFLPA’s P.R. push for grass fields should focus less on making a broad-brush effort to shame the owners into choosing a better surface and more on getting specific teams to flip. That effort, as previously explained, should start with the Seahawks, who are in the process of getting a new owner.
On Tuesday, a pair of Seattle veterans made the case for grass during training-camp press conferences.
Defensive lineman Leonard Williams was asked whether seeing temporary grass at Lumen Field for the World Cup made him wish the grass would remain permanently.
“For sure,” Williams told reporters, “I think the whole NFL felt that way. We obviously prefer to be on grass. It’s less impact, better on the body. I understand there’s a lot of things that go into having grass in the stadium that I don’t fully understand yet, but if it was up to a player and it just came down to grass or turf, we obviously prefer grass.”
Receiver Cooper Kupp was initially more concise. “That would be sweet,” he said with a laugh.
Why the laugh? “It would be awesome,” Kupp said. “I’ve been vocal about it in the past. There’s so many moving parts, which I get. What we need to do — there’s a great crew that works out in that shed out there. It’s a great crew that keeps this [practice field] grass nice. Go ask them, ‘Hey, what would it look like?’ I don’t know the ‘grassology’ of all that stuff. You got soccer teams playing on it, you have a lot of stuff happening. You have events being hosted. I would like to think with all the resources in the NFL that we can make that happen. There’s people that can make that happen. We need to, as players, keep voicing what we want and what we think is important, but eventually I do think it’ll get done.”
The best place to start would be in Seattle.
“It makes a huge difference,” Kupp said regarding the difference between grass and artificial turf. “I know all the metrics and all the data that say the injury rates of this, but I don’t know. I know how I feel. You ask a lot of players who will say the same thing. Whether injury rates change or not, I know how my body feels, everything on turf versus grass. You can ask coaches how their backs feel after standing on the turf versus grass. Coaches have a lot of other issues. But it does make a difference. . . .
“It’s possible. I know it’s possible. It’s a conversation that needs to continue.”
At some point, the conversation needs to become action. It has become a Collective Bargaining Agreement issue, which means that the players will have to give something up in order to get grass on all fields. But the individual teams can still choose grass over turf, like the Bills have done in their new stadium.
With the Seahawks soon having a new owner, why not launch a concerted effort to get Vinod Khosla to install a high-quality grass field that can be properly maintained and protected during the other events held at Lumen Field?
Talk is cheap. Grass fields aren’t. The players need to find a way to get more owners to ignore misleading injury data and to focus on the overwhelming anecdotal evidence that the players who have to perform on grass or turf strongly prefer grass because of how their bodies feel after playing on it, versus how they feel after playing on a surface that causes the extreme forces they create to ricochet back into their ankles, knees, and hips.