Did World Cup Expose NFL Hypocrisy? | Steelers Morning Rush
Welcome to Steelers Morning Rush, our new daily short-form podcast with Alan Saunders, giving a longer perspective on a single news topic surrounding the Pittsburgh Steelers or the National Football League. Today, it's the NFL players asking the league to keep the grass that NFL stadiums brought into to play the World Cup over the last few weeks. But is it as simple as that decision, especially in a place like MetLife Stadium, which hosted the final on Sunday, and has 20 NFL games scheduled for this season. Alan breaks it down.#steelers #herewego #nfl CONNECT WITH STEELERS NOW: Steelers Now: https://steelersnow.com SN on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pghsteelersnow SN on FB: https://facebook.com/steelersnow SN on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/pghsteelersnow/
Video Transcript
Let's see if I remember how to do this.
Hey, folks.
Good morning and welcome to another episode of Steelers Morning Rush.
I'm Allen Saunders.
It is Monday, July 20th.
I am back from vacation, and we are just over a week from the start of Pittsburgh Steelers training camp.
It is nearly here.
I'm sure we're gonna talk about that a lot more this week here on the Morning Rush and on Afternoon Drive with me and Smitty back at it.
We'll probably do some kind of formal training camp preview leading up to report day next Tuesday.
Today, I wanna talk about something that happened over the week I was gone, and especially sort of came to a crescendo yesterday during the World Cup final, and that is the conversation about grass fields in the NFL, and the NFLPA clearly putting out a concerted effort from its players.
I saw several players, including Steelers linebacker Patrick Quitz- Queen send out a version of the same tweet saying, "Hey, we deserve to have the same grass that you brought in for these soccer players in these NFL stadiums over the several weeks of the World Cup."
And, you know, a lot of the sentiment I saw online was, "Yeah, just keep it.
Keep the grass."
And especially at a place like MetLife Stadium, where the final was on Sunday, that's just not how any of this works.
And I'm not saying that the NFL shouldn't have grass fields or that the NFL couldn't have grass fields, it's just a lot more complicated than it is to have grass for soccer.
One NFL game with 300-pound linemen and 11 players tightly condensed on the trenches will have almost a season's worth of wear on a soccer pitch.
When the NFL has gone to Europe and played, those teams have either not allowed the NFL to play on their surface, or they've immediately needed to replace their surface after the NFL played on it.
You can play dozens and dozens of soccer games on the same grass that would not last three weeks of an NFL season.
Now you're talking about, especially in New York, a stadium that has two teams in a northern climate, where grass will not grow after, you know, November.
Now what?
I mean, look, if you can do it in Pittsburgh, you can do it anywhere.
Steelers have a shared facility.
There's 10 Steelers home games every year.
There's usually at least, sometimes 11, sometimes 12, m- maybe sometimes 13.
There's usually nine Pitt home games.
Pitt usually plays a scrimmage there.
They've got a spring game there.
There's a couple of concerts.
The Steelers sometimes have a training camp practice there.
It gets a lot of work.
It gets more work than probably any other Oh, I for- how did I forget, four high school football games the weekend of Thanksgiving.
It probably gets more work than any grass stadium in the Northern United States.
And look, sometimes it looks like it.
There have been years, last year was one of them, where the grass did not do very well.
The Steelers have changed turf suppliers.
They got a different thing going on this year.
We'll see if that helps.
But look, could the Jets and the Giants put grass in Giants Stadium?
Absolutely.
But it would cost a lot of money.
A lot of money.
And I'm not saying they shouldn't, it would just need replaced many, many times.
You would need to secure enough grass a year in advance to have enough replacement surfaces to be able to replace it over and over and over again.
And the other thing about MetLife, there are no off weeks for that stadium.
So when the Steelers replace their turf, they usually do it when they're going to have a weekend where the stadium is not being used.
So during the college football stadium, that might, season, that might be a, a week where, maybe you get a week where Pitt and the Steelers are both on the road.
Maybe you get a week where one of them plays on a Thursday, or one of them plays on a Monday, and you can give the grass some time to take hold.
That stadium, never off.
One of those two teams is home every week, 'cause that's the only way it works.
Otherwise, they'd need to both be home one week, and that, I mean, that would be really tough for the grass.
And so, 20 weeks in a row, no weeks off.
You'd almost need to build something like the, Raiders have and the Cardinals have, where one set of grass could go out into the parking lot to recover and possibly be replaced while the other set comes back in and gets played on.
Now, the one thing that stadium has is plenty of parking lot space.
If you saw the videos of the World Cup final and the Argentine fans attempting to cross the highway, well, it was the only entertaining thing anyone from Argentina did all day.
But this Look, this is a complicated issue.
It's not something that the NFL can easily solve in a lot of places.
And that doesn't even begin, like, yeah, you can roll out the, the carpet in Las Vegas, where they built a new stadium in an empty block of the town- I think they tore some things down, but it was not a built-up area.
Where's Atlanta gonna slide a, a turf field to?
There are no sea of parking lots around that stadium.
It's right in the middle of downtown.
Same with Minneapolis.
You know, like, so it seems like the trend in the NFL is dome stadiums.
Well, if you're gonna build a dome, it's gonna be very hard to have grass.
It's not impossible, but it's very hard and takes a lot of space in addition to the footprint of the stadium that a lot of places aren't gonna have.
We'll see what the Browns do.
We'll see what the, Commanders do.
Maybe if the Bears ever commit to a plan, we'll see what they do.
But this is not some process that is just easily done.
You basically need to decide when you're building your stadium what kind of turf you wanna have and engineer the solutions to having grass into it in a lot of cases.
There are only so many NFL stadiums right now that have turf that you could just easily retrofit with grass instead, without significant engineering challenges or capital investments in the infrastructure of the stadium, where you just rip up the carpet, throw down some grass seed and say, "Okay, let's play."
I guess New England is one.
It, you know, that, and that is a stadium that brought in grass for the World Cup.
I, you know That's one.
But they have had grass at that stadium before, and they went back to field turf, because they had a hard time maintaining it.
And so, yeah.
Not an easy issue, as Pittsburgh shows the world, as we struggle sometimes to put, a playable grass surface out there based on its usage, based on our weather conditions.
Not everyone has it quite so easy, but I do think football is best when played on grass, and I think it's best when played outdoors as well.
So, that's my two cents.
Just wanted to give some context because I think some people were under the impression that this was just a, "Hey, just leave the grass you brought in for the World Cup and everything's solved," kind of fix, and it, it's way, way tougher than that.
All right, thanks for listening to me, rant this morning.
More Steelers talk on the afternoon drive.
Back with Smitty, 6:00 PM, usual YouTube, audio platforms, et cetera, et cetera.
Until then, thanks for listening, thanks for watching, and shout-out to Brendan Howe, who I thought did a very good job while I was gone.
More of him on this channel as we get ready for training camp as well.
Until then, thanks for listening, thanks for watching, and enjoy.
