The list of National Football League players who have gone down already this season with non-contact injuries could fill quite a Pro Bowl roster. At the quarterback position alone, you’ve got Baltimore Raven Lamar Jackson and Washington Commander Jayden Daniels suffering hamstring injuries and Cincinnati Bengal Joe Burrow and San Francisco 49er Brock Purdy suffering turf toe this season, as I covered in Forbes on October 2. And you’ve gotta wonder whether all of this will intensity the ongoing “turf” battle between players and owners over, well, artificial turf.
Half the NFL stadium fields are now covered by some kind of artificial turf. Yet, the NFL Players Association director Lloyd Howell already said at a press conference in 2024 that “Ninety-two percent of our union wants grass,” meaning natural grass fields. And NFLPA President J.C. Tretter has written a letter arguing that artificial turf is significantly harder on the body than grass” and that “NFL clubs should proactively change all field surfaces to natural grass.” In fact, in June of this year, when PIX11 Sports tweeted out (or perhaps X’d out) that the artificial turf of MatLife Stadium had been temporarily replaced with natural grass for a different type of football match—what Americans call soccer—the NFLPA responded with a simple, short and somewhat snarky “Looks nice #SaferFields,” accompanied by a monocled emoji:
MetLife Stadium is where the New York Giants and Jets—at least one of which can be considered an NFL team—regularly play. The temporary switch was made for the FIFA World Club Cup Group Stage game that was occurring there. You don’t really have to read between the lines of that X—in part because there was only one line—to interpret it as the NFLPA wanting to make such a change to natural grass permanent.
Artificial Turf Is Now In Half Of NFL Stadiums Due To Durability And Cost
It is “turf” to say whether NFL owners will heed such a plea, though. This could be a dollar and sense issue. The primary advantage of artificial turf is that it is easier and cheaper to maintain. You don’t have to do all the mowing, fertilizing, watering, exposing to the sun and other things needed for grass fields.
Artificial turf made its first appearance in 1965 at the Houston Astrodome when there was a growing problem, meaning it was a struggle at the time to keep real grass growing indoors under the dome without direct exposure to the sun there. Thus, the first iteration of artificial turf become known as Astroturf. In 1969, Franklin Field in Philadelphia, where it’s not always sunny, became the first NFL field to have artificial turf.
Then over the next two decades, more and more stadiums adopted the artificial stuff. It’s gotten a point to where even the two NFL teams in Los Angeles, the Rams and the Chargers, have gone artificial. Granted, it may not be unusual to hear of something going from natural to artificial in Los Angeles. But this highlights the fact that even some stadiums in good weather locations now have artificial turf.
Naturally, the artificial stuff today is not the same as the synthetic turf from the 1960s and 1970s or even the 1980s and 1990s. The synthetic “grass” blades of today made up of polymers like polyethylene, polypropylene, and nylon are softer and less Brillo Paddy than they were before as is the the polyurethane, polyester or poly whatever backing that sits under the blades. Today’s editions also have infill layers beneath composed of substances like crumb rubber from recycled tires, sand, plastic pellets and other materials that offer more cushioning.
But—and it’s a big but one cannot lie—today’s turfs are still not the same as natural grass. NFL-NFLPA inspectors do use something called the Clegg test to measure the hardness of a field. This entails dropping a hammer from an established height and then measuring using electric pulses how much it decelerates when hitting the ground. Of course, humans aren’t hammers, no how much of tool a given person may be. So this test does not fully capture the potential effects of the field on the human body.
Studies Have Shown That Various Injuries Are More Common On Artificial Turf
A number of studies have already shown that various injuries are more common on artificial turf than on natural grass. For example, there was that study published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine that looked at major injuries to college football players from the 2004-2005 through the 2013-2014 seasons. Over that decade, tears of posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) were about three times more likely on artificial turf than on grass at all three college football levels. At the division II and III levels, anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears were 1.6 times more likely on the synthetic stuff.
Tretter’s letter also offered what the NFLPA found when it had analyzed the NFL’s official injury reports from 2012 through 2018. Players had a 32% higher rate of non-contact knee injuries on artificial fields compared the oh naturale stuff. They also had 69% higher rate of non-contact foot or ankle injuries.
Then there was that systematic review published in 2022 in the American Journal of Sports Medicine of all the available scientific studies to date that compared the rates of lower extremity injuries on artificial turf compared to those on natural grass. The review did find consistently higher ankle and foot injury rates on artificial turf. Oh and here’s a shocker, the authors indicated that, “Only a few articles in the literature reported a higher overall injury rate on natural grass compared with artificial turf,” and, guess what, “all of these studies received financial support from the artificial turf industry.”
Finally, you can’t turf the question as to what might be happening to heads. Another study published in American Journal of Sports Medicine looked at the concussion rates of both collegiate and high school football players. It revealed that among concussions that resulted from noggings hitting the ground a disproportionately higher proportion of them occurred on artificial turf. Artificial turf was associated with more serious concussions as well.
Artificial Turf Doesn’t Have The Same Give As Natural Grass
If you are wondering, “what gives” with these higher injury rates on artificial turf, the answer may be natural grass giving more than the synthetic stuff. When you push, plant or dig your foot, hand, head or other body parts into a grass field, the grass and the underlaying dirt can give way to decent extent. That’s because grass and dirt can move and even fly up into the air. By contrast, artificial turf is a little more like a forehead on Botox. It doesn’t move quite as much and can be less soft, all leading to less give.
If you are wondering how this may translate to injuries, use the force and remember the New Radicals song You Get What You Give. During any kind of forceful contact or collision between things, whatever gives more can get more of the force generated. If the ground gets a lot of that force, that’s OK. You don’t worry about the ground getting injured. However, if your body gets more of the force, the result can different body parts stretching, tearing or breaking.
Indeed, in his NFLPA letter, Tretter did write, “Professional football players put extremely high levels of force and rotation onto the playing surface.” And he then gave the give argument, “Grass will eventually give, which often releases the cleat prior to reaching an injurious load. On synthetic surfaces, there is less give, meaning our feet, ankles and knees absorb the force, which makes injury more likely to follow.”
That’s the theory. But it’s also an issue in practice, namely NFL team practices. In the letter, Tretter mentioned that many NFL practice fields consist of synthetic material rather than natural grass as well. That means whatever give and force differences that are present on Sundays—and Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Fridays and whatever days of the week NFL games are now being played—are present throughout the week when players practice too.
The rationale for having practice fields be artificial turf is presumably a dollars and cents one as well. But you’ve got to wonder whether players being paid millions of dollars going down with non-contact injuries might be grounds for more switches to natural grass. Now, not every non-contact injury may be attributable to the field. I’ve already detailed in Forbes how other factors could be contributing to recent rises in injury rates such as longer NFL seasons and longer college seasons adding to the overall wear and tear of players over time. But data does suggest that artificial fields could be at least adding to the risk of injury. Plus, it’s already been demonstrated that indoor stadiums in Arizona and Las Vegas and stadiums in worse weather locations like Green Bay, Chicago and Pittsburgh can readily maintain natural grass fields. The question then is whether switching all other football fields back to real grass would be the natural thing to do.
