In their continued effort to make the game safer for players the NFL has issued a new mandate for all stadiums.
Every football fan at one time or another has seen a game where the playing surface was in such bad shape that the players were slipping, sliding, skating, and falling on the field.
NFL field director Nick Pappas has issued new orders in regards to the playing surface to be in place by the start of the 2028 season.
Pappas noted that the plan will have “a library of approved and accredited NFL fields”.
While the mandate has set a 2028 deadline, any team who resurfaces their field will have to meet the new mandates immediately. Synthetic “grass”, natural grass, or a hybrid of both are allowed as a playing surface.
NFL chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills stated, “there are no statistically significant differences in lower extremity injuries or concussions that can be attributed to the type of playing surface or a specific surface.”
Pappas pointed out that stadiums with artificial “grass” replace the playing field every two to three years; but, stadiums with natural grass must be replaced several times during the season.
The new playing surfaces will have to undergo extensive testing and be approved by a joint committee and the NFL Players Association.
Speaking on the new mandate Pappas said, “it’s sort of a red, yellow, green effect, where we’re obviously trying to phase out fields that we have determined to be less ideal than newer fields coming into the industry. This is a big step for us. This is something that I think has been a great outcome from the Joint Surfaces Committee of the work, the deployment and development of devices determining the appropriate metrics, and ultimately providing us with a way to substantiate the quality of fields more so than we ever have in the past.”
As for testing the fields, Pappas said a traction testing device called the BEAST that can mimic the moves of the players. The STRIKE Impact Tester determines the firmness of the field.
Along with enhanced safety, the NFL is looking for consistency across all 30 stadiums.
Dr. Stills noted, “the surface is only one driver of these lower extremity injuries. There are a lot of other factors, including player load and previous history and fatigue and positional adaptability and cleats that are worn. So surfaces are a component, but it is a complex equation, and so I’m excited about where we are in the work because I think we’ll get away from a very crude measurement of artificial here and the grass here, and now we can say for any individual surface, let’s look at the biophysical properties of that surface. How might those correlate with injury? And then, obviously, how do we optimize them?”
The Super Bowl on February 8 will be held at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California – the home of the San Francisco 49ers. The surface for the game will be natural grass which is currently being grown at a sod farm east of the Bay Area. Currently plans are to “plant” the new surface in the third week of January.