With the World Cup finale happening Sunday on a grass field that will be promptly torn up and replaced with plastic turf for the twenty NFL games to be played there this season, plus any home playoff games for the Giants or the Jets (stop laughing), the NFL’s players launched a social-media campaign on Friday aimed at shaming owners into putting high-quality grass in all NFL stadiums.
The coordinated hashtag — #WorthTheCost — appeared in posts from multiple players, including stars like Bears quarterback Caleb Williams. (His team, the Bears, play on grass. But they’re trying to build a dome. If/when they do, it will be interesting to see whether they devise a system for playing NFL games on grass there.)
Currently, half of the NFL’s teams play their home games on grass. The other half play on artificial turf.
The P.R. campaign by the NFLPA makes sense. Unlike the MLB’s clumsy, ill-advised effort to take its effort to establish a salary cap to the people with TV commercials, the NFLPA’s grass-roots (pun absolutely intended) attempt to build public pressure on owners makes sense, for one very important reason — it’s the only strategy that has a snowball’s chance in San Diego of working.
On Thursday’s #PFTPM, a viewer asked whether there will “finally be the end-all, be-all battle between owners and the NFLPA over turf vs grass in the next CBA?”
And the answer is no.
It’s one thing for 92 percent of the players to have a preference for grass. It’s quite another thing for 92 percent of the players (or, for CBA purposes, at least 50.1 percent) to prioritize grass over turf in the next round of Collective Bargaining Agreement talks.
To get grass as a matter of labor negotiations, the players would have to give up something else. Like money. At a bare minimum, the league would want to split the total cost of installing and maintaining high-quality grass at the stadiums where turf is the current standard.
That could mean, for some of the indoor facilities, exorbitant expenses related to growing good grass indoors and/or retrofitting the stadium to have a grass field that can be slid outside (or to install an elaborate system that puts the grass underground when other events are scheduled there). It also could mean, for stadiums in which the grass field can’t be moved for other events, sharing the lost revenue from not being able to hold other major events there.
The NFL would concoct a massive number for the cost and lost revenue of putting grass in all stadiums, and the players would have to choose between having that money removed from the pool that funds the salary cap or settling for the status quo.
Would they give up some green to get grass? For the half of the league that plays its home games on grass, it would be very easy to say, “Screw that.”
And so they need another way to get there. Shaming the owners into choosing to incur the expenses associated with a conversion to grass avoids making it a CBA issue. But it still won’t work. First, some of the owners have no shame. Second, why would they buckle over a social-media onslaught?
Even if the push for grass becomes a brushfire throughout the football-watching world, what will the fans do? Boycott games played on artificial turf?
“Hey, Frank, the Ravens and the Patriots are playing on Sunday night.”
“Where’s the game, Bill?”
“Let me check. It’s in New England.”
“Oh, they play on turf. I ain’t watching that shit.”
“Wait, I was wrong. They play in Baltimore.”
“Great. What time should I come over?”
Is it wrong for owners to hide behind misleading statistics about relative injury rates and require players to play on a surface that sees the forces they generate ricochet back into their bodies? Yes. Will a pressure campaign to get them to choose grass move the needle?
Hell no.
This fight was lost decades ago, when the first fake fields were installed. The cheaper, multi-purpose, green cement surfaces proliferated without a peep from the players. And so, one CBA after another, the owners’ flexibility to choose grass or turf became part of management’s prerogative.
Now, it’s too late to put the clippings back in the lawnmower bag without the players making a concession at the CBA table. Unless and until they do, they’ll have to hope that more teams will choose to defy the NFL’s default bargaining position and choose grass (like the Bills have done in their new stadium) while also hoping that more teams won’t choose to exercise their unilateral power to ditch grass for turf (like the Steelers might do if their new effort at grass continues to be ass).
There’s no harm in the players trying to attract attention to the issue. Still, there’s no way out of this maze that doesn’t entail the players giving up a lot of money to get there.
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