Metlife Turf

[jayrad01]

39 minutes ago, Dcat said:

Cashman, Will Anderson, Stroud....  all to be added to the list of players that the "improved" new MuttLife turf has swallowed alive.

MuttLife turf is toxic to one's NFL career.  I wouldn't want to play for either the Giants or the Jets. It's pretty obvious this turf is demonic.

Stroud? It was Quinnin Williams that got him not the turf. 

[RoadFan]

6 hours ago, BP said:

Woody is an idiot, and the Giants are intelligent. There’s no way a grass field lasts for almost 20 football games from August to January. Most teams that have grass only play 8 or 9 games on it, and even those have to constantly be repaired and facelifted or spray paint the mud. A grass field will never work at MetLife 

Glad you brought that up.  I hadn’t considered that MetLife doesn’t get a break.  
 

European football pitches survive cold weather and 1-2 matches per week.  I suppose the counter-point is that the wear and tear from play is more spread out as opposed to what happens in the trenches between the hash marks.

I am no grass expert, but NFL teams and college stadiums survive with grass and sh*t weather.

[Sperm Edwards]

6 hours ago, BP said:

Woody is an idiot, and the Giants are intelligent. There’s no way a grass field lasts for almost 20 football games from August to January. Most teams that have grass only play 8 or 9 games on it, and even those have to constantly be repaired and facelifted or spray paint the mud. A grass field will never work at MetLife 

You're going against the grain here. All people know is they want something. Also Woody's fault, as though he doesn't have 50-50 business partners or anything on the Giants' side. 

Regardless you cannot combat these anecdotal summaries every time a game-injury occurs:

All lower-body grass injuries shrugged off as an inevitable side effect of a rough sport. 

All lower-body turf injures are blamed on the turf.

e.g. is there even the slightest doubt that either one (let alone both) of AVT's back to back injuries would be added up as a result of the MetLife turf if they'd both occurred on the team's home field? Rodgers' Achilles was blamed on the turf (and the crappy OL and his age); young AVT's same injury ignored any field factors and instead presumed he was just injury prone or it was a freak accident or it's because he was playing RT instead of guard or some silly rationalization like that. Should his first injury even count at all in this data, seeing how it was a torn triceps? Do the studies remove all injuries above the knee, or just non-contact injuries resulting in IR designation? There's a reason there are snide expressions about statistics. Crap in = crap out.

League-wide there may be a small increase in injuries on grass vs. all artificial turf types (not specifically this one) aggregately. What none of these analyses add up is how many additional grass field injuries there'd be in a shared stadium like here or in Los Angeles. I also don't know if those also take into account the climates (warmer stadiums allowing for faster/better recovery than up north) and normalize data for that, or if they just presume all climates yield the same injury rates on natural surfaces. Also unknown if they eliminate all non-contact injuries that occur above the knee, as I alluded to above. My guess is no. Players like it better, but what they like is a good grass field not necessarily any grass field. The super bowl grass turf in Arizona, for example, was an embarrassment.

The reality is there is no magic natural grass turf that regenerates to game-height, in a few days, on chewed-up and compacted soil, in the cold northeast winters, and there's no way to rotate in/out a full field for each team like they do with 1 field in Vegas or Arizona. The stadium just wasn't engineered for that.

The only potential solution I can imagine is if they come up with a much deeper tray system than they tried ~20 years ago, when they more or less laid thin sod trays on top of the old astroturf with no drainage or ability for the soil to compact with the sod more so the sod's less likely to come up in clumps. If they went with a tray at least a couple feet deep (the Arizona full-field tray is 3' deep) maybe it'd work - if the connecting seams wouldn't still be an issue, of course - but such deep trays would have a massive weight & couldn't be swapped in/out nearly as easily as the awful tray system they tried in Giants Stadium.

Absent that? They need separate stadiums or hope the artificial turfs keep getting better (which they do). 

[rangerous]

1 hour ago, Sperm Edwards said:

You're going against the grain here. All people know is they want something. Also Woody's fault, as though he doesn't have 50-50 business partners or anything on the Giants' side. 

Regardless you cannot combat these anecdotal summaries every time a game-injury occurs:

All lower-body grass injuries shrugged off as an inevitable side effect of a rough sport. 

All lower-body turf injures are blamed on the turf.

e.g. is there even the slightest doubt that either one (let alone both) of AVT's back to back injuries would be added up as a result of the MetLife turf if they'd both occurred on the team's home field? Rodgers' Achilles was blamed on the turf (and the crappy OL and his age); young AVT's same injury ignored any field factors and instead presumed he was just injury prone or it was a freak accident or it's because he was playing RT instead of guard or some silly rationalization like that. Should his first injury even count at all in this data, seeing how it was a torn triceps? Do the studies remove all injuries above the knee, or just non-contact injuries resulting in IR designation? There's a reason there are snide expressions about statistics. Crap in = crap out.

League-wide there may be a small increase in injuries on grass vs. all artificial turf types (not specifically this one) aggregately. What none of these analyses add up is how many additional grass field injuries there'd be in a shared stadium like here or in Los Angeles. I also don't know if those also take into account the climates (warmer stadiums allowing for faster/better recovery than up north) and normalize data for that, or if they just presume all climates yield the same injury rates on natural surfaces. Also unknown if they eliminate all non-contact injuries that occur above the knee, as I alluded to above. My guess is no. Players like it better, but what they like is a good grass field not necessarily any grass field. The super bowl grass turf in Arizona, for example, was an embarrassment.

The reality is there is no magic natural grass turf that regenerates to game-height, in a few days, on chewed-up and compacted soil, in the cold northeast winters, and there's no way to rotate in/out a full field for each team like they do with 1 field in Vegas or Arizona. The stadium just wasn't engineered for that.

The only potential solution I can imagine is if they come up with a much deeper tray system than they tried ~20 years ago, when they more or less laid thin sod trays on top of the old astroturf with no drainage or ability for the soil to compact with the sod more so the sod's less likely to come up in clumps. If they went with a tray at least a couple feet deep (the Arizona full-field tray is 3' deep) maybe it'd work - if the connecting seams wouldn't still be an issue, of course - but such deep trays would have a massive weight & couldn't be swapped in/out nearly as easily as the awful tray system they tried in Giants Stadium.

Absent that? They need separate stadiums or hope the artificial turfs keep getting better (which they do). 

Or build a roof on the stadium.  Then they don’t have to worry about the weather.

[Sperm Edwards]

2 minutes ago, rangerous said:

Or build a roof on the stadium.  Then they don’t have to worry about the weather.

They leave it uncovered in between games (unless there's concern about too much rain/snow to disallow drainage). Grass still needs sunlight, and it gets less as it is in the winter. The roof is just for game days. 

Regardless, there isn't a roof on MetLife stadium and they're not building one. Imagine the condition of a natural grass field with 9 rainy Sundays of guys running on it with cleats. There would arguably be even more injuries. 

Again, people notice artificial turf injuries as though 100% of them were preventable by a change in turf to natural grass, and shrug off natural grass injuries as inevitable given the nature of the sport. It's a heads I win, tails you lose argument. 

[JetsMan57]

Id love to know why these players dont form a class action lawsuit against Woody and Mara. Natural grass would be put down by Saturday

[rangerous]

9 minutes ago, Sperm Edwards said:

They leave it uncovered in between games (unless there's concern about too much rain/snow to disallow drainage). Grass still needs sunlight, and it gets less as it is in the winter. The roof is just for game days. 

Regardless, there isn't a roof on MetLife stadium and they're not building one. Imagine the condition of a natural grass field with 9 rainy Sundays of guys running on it with cleats. There would arguably be even more injuries. 

Again, people notice artificial turf injuries as though 100% of them were preventable by a change in turf to natural grass, and shrug off natural grass injuries as inevitable given the nature of the sport. It's a heads I win, tails you lose argument. 

True enough but they were pretty silly to not put a roof on it, turf, grass, concrete, whatever.

[Sperm Edwards]

Just now, rangerous said:

True enough but they were pretty silly to not put a roof on it, turf, grass, concrete, whatever.

I would've liked it, but at the time there were plenty saying it removed a lot of home field advantage, plus the roof alone would've been 25% of the cost of the rest of the build ($2BN vs $1.6BN iirc). They'd certainly be able to host more non-football / non-sports events there in the crappy weather, and warm weather events would never be in danger of cancellation in a rainstorm, but that's their problem. 

Point is a roof still wouldn't make a grass field fit for two home teams to share.

[Jetsfan80]

18 hours ago, RoadFan said:

I think it’s these cold, rainy games.  Jets and Giants each play at least 2 of them every season.  Sometimes, as many as 4.  
Terrible for the players and fans.  Half the home games in a 40-60 degree downpour?  Disgusting…

Should’ve been a retractable dome stadium, because of course.  

[JoeNamathsFurCoat]

16 hours ago, BornJetsFan1983 said:

How many people has met life claimed this year it has been a couple

Jaelan Phillips also tore his Achilles.

Thought Knoblauch was done-zo yesterday when we saw that left knee buckle.

[JoeNamathsFurCoat]

This is really where we need GM / owner Rodgers to bring his influence to bear.

Gotta figure if he tells Woody to get it done, it gets done.

[JoeNamathsFurCoat]

Kind of ironic that the stadium is sponsored by an insurance company.

Players should seriously consider taking out a "Lloyd's of London" special prior to subjecting themselves to career-threatening injury on the Maim-Life turf.

https://www.lloyds.com/conducting-business/regulatory-tools/risk-location-guidance/class-of-business/accident-and-sickness

[Cut Jet Penalty Makers]

21 hours ago, RoadFan said:

The NFLPA should file a lawsuit against Woody and Mara…

 

I suspect Mara is the culprit...after all, he is the one who refused to have this stadium built with a dome.

[ECURB]

The turf injury conspiracy theories are entertaining at least.

Can we as a fan base at least do better at complaining? Not just say… sell the team woody! And the turf at MetLife sucks!

[ECURB]

Let’s just ignore RG3s knee exploding in the mud at FedEx field OR the Pats having to install the SAME BRAND TURF as MetLife mid season because of the sloppy natural grass that was a risk to player safety.

Its just easier to be a tin foil hat wearing cry baby and blame Woody 🤦🏻‍♂️

[rangerous]

15 hours ago, Sperm Edwards said:

I would've liked it, but at the time there were plenty saying it removed a lot of home field advantage, plus the roof alone would've been 25% of the cost of the rest of the build ($2BN vs $1.6BN iirc). They'd certainly be able to host more non-football / non-sports events there in the crappy weather, and warm weather events would never be in danger of cancellation in a rainstorm, but that's their problem. 

Point is a roof still wouldn't make a grass field fit for two home teams to share.

Yep.  I think most fans would’ve preferred the west side stadium. I know I would be way more inclined to go to the games if they played on the east side of the Hudson.  As for a roof, I don’t think they realize how they lucked out, weather wise, when they hosted the Super Bowl.

[JetsFanatic]

On 12/10/2023 at 9:04 PM, heymangold said:

Saw somewhere that woody wants grass but the giants don’t.

 

blame the giants.

I also read the Jets wanted a dome and the Giants didn’t.

[Falco21]

I just do not understand why turf is even a thing at this level.

These teams make billions of dollars yet they can not maintain a grass field? The human body is not meant to withstand some of these twists and turns. It always reminds me of putting slicks on a car. You can run cars with over 700 horsepower without issue. As soon as you put slicks on it and you grab at that torque, everything starts breaking. 

[Dunnie]

The turf injury conspiracy theories are entertaining at least.
Can we as a fan base at least do better at complaining? Not just say… sell the team woody! And the turf at MetLife sucks!

There has to be a simple turf vs grass injury rate report. Has to be.

Sent from my Pixel 7 using Tapatalk

[jetsfan4life72]

10 minutes ago, Dunnie said:

There has to be a simple turf vs grass injury rate report. Has to be.

Sent from my Pixel 7 using Tapatalk
 

I can’t find it but earlier there was a report showing more Achilles on grass this season. 
 

Cleats and taping ankles are also an issue. These athletes tape up their ankles to immobilize which is going to put their Achilles and their knees at risk. If your ankles aren’t able to bend/move naturally, that’s a lot of stress on the Achilles and knee. 

[JetPotato]

On 12/10/2023 at 9:04 PM, heymangold said:

Saw somewhere that woody wants grass but the giants don’t.

 

blame the giants.

Yeah. But chicken cutlets. Or something.

[BornJetsFan1983]

18 hours ago, JoeNamathsFurCoat said:

This is really where we need GM / owner Rodgers to bring his influence to bear.

Gotta figure if he tells Woody to get it done, it gets done.

I would take it a policy if  I played haha

[BornJetsFan1983]

2 hours ago, jetsfan4life72 said:

I can’t find it but earlier there was a report showing more Achilles on grass this season. 
 

Cleats and taping ankles are also an issue. These athletes tape up their ankles to immobilize which is going to put their Achilles and their knees at risk. If your ankles aren’t able to bend/move naturally, that’s a lot of stress on the Achilles and knee. 

I want a Mets life verse other locations not met life verse all kind of thing.

[ECURB]

14 hours ago, Dunnie said:

There has to be a simple turf vs grass injury rate report. Has to be.

Sent from my Pixel 7 using Tapatalk
 

Nope. jets fans are just cry babies sadly. Myself included 😂

The Pats paid the same company for a turf field to replace their grass and got cheered for it. JETS fans want a new owner 🤦🏻‍♂️

[ECURB]

On 12/12/2023 at 7:56 AM, Dunnie said:

There has to be a simple turf vs grass injury rate report. Has to be.

Sent from my Pixel 7 using Tapatalk
 

There is and it’s not a big spread.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/38624943/inside-nfl-turf-debate-injuries-safety-measures-more#

[Larz]

This is also a brand new type of turf. I don’t think many stadiums will be switching to it right away. Probably want to see more data. 
 

With that said multiple players have said that the turf is trash. 
 

I was in the “you can’t have grass in a shared stadium “ camp until I saw that the Broncos replaced the grass mid season this year. 
 

If the NFL would agree to give the jets and giants the same bye week and as close to the middle of the season as possible, I think it would be worth it to explore replacing the grass mid season. 
 

they could add a grass warming feature like lambeau has as well.  
 

im no expert but if it takes several days to replace it if you give it a week to “take” it should survive the season 

[Sperm Edwards]

3 minutes ago, ECURB said:

There is and it’s not a big spread.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/38624943/inside-nfl-turf-debate-injuries-safety-measures-more#

Imagine how small that spread would be - if not actually flipped the other way - if the Jets and Giants were both sharing the same grass field all season long, especially in a football season that’s felt like it was setting records for rainy weekends up here, when natural grass’s growing season ends in the first half of the football season, requiring it to then be repaired exclusively with freshly-laid sod that just gets kicked up with ease like that disgrace of a super bowl field this past February).

A grass field in poor condition can lead to just as many - if not more - non-contact, lower-extremity injuries than will a modern artificial turf. 

There are injuries that happen as a result of the artificial turf. There are also injuries that are probably avoided on artificial turf that would’ve happened on grass (or that have happened on grass fields that may not have happened on turf), but we never get to see what didn’t happen. There is no perfect solution, as much as we all wish there was. All of us hate seeing players get injured, but it’s a rough sport.

Where I’m sympathetic is in the injury areas the short-term data ignores: there may be more nagging injuries - bruises & minor knee/ankle injuries - that go unreported for not being serious enough, and long term wear on joints may be worse (hard to have a perfect/reliable split-test with different players, games, weather conditions, etc.). Honestly even the data they use is suspect, if it can be dead-even one year and then almost 20% different the next year, it suggests there’s a high margin of error and looking at any one season - from either side of the debate - means one’s making too broad of a conclusion based on data that contains a lot of statistical noise.

Further than that, reducing injury data only to non-contact injuries tbh probably removes some of that. Technically Rodgers’ injury wasn’t of the non-contact variety, for example, so he’d be excluded from the data. So would both of AVT’s injuries that occurred on grass, I’m sure. I get that they’re trying to remove any wiggle room from rough hits that could’ve resulted in injury either way, but it’s such a major flaw in the conditions that tbh the whole data set is corrupted from the outset. 

I do think the maintenance cost angle is not only overblown but it’s nonsensical, particularly in a shared stadium or with billionaire owners for whom the maintenance cost is so insignificant, seeing how a single up or down stock market day for them eclipses a season-long disparity in field maintenance pricetags that are relative rounding errors at barely 1% of the salary cap. FFS it’s a rounding error on the up-front + annual costs of just their private jets. It’s just not a decision-altering amount. “Hey, I paid $1-5BN for this team, and with the up-front bonuses we’re already paying out as though there’s a quarter of a billion dollar salary cap every year, where I draw the line is that no way am I going to help keep my expensive team healthier & thus more likely a winner with an extra annual cost of 1/1000th of my investment, which I’ll never notice is gone anyway.”

The idea that owners don’t give a crap if multiple of their $10-50MM/year elite players go on IR because of shoddy turf is imaginary. What anyone hates more than spending extra money that wasn’t necessary is spending far more than that and getting nothing for it because of an amount that wouldn’t even slightly alter their own lifestyles. 

[T0mShane]

On 12/12/2023 at 8:09 AM, jetsfan4life72 said:

I can’t find it but earlier there was a report showing more Achilles on grass this season. 
 

Cleats and taping ankles are also an issue. These athletes tape up their ankles to immobilize which is going to put their Achilles and their knees at risk. If your ankles aren’t able to bend/move naturally, that’s a lot of stress on the Achilles and knee. 

I think it’s the speed training all these guys do now, trying to get more explosive. You can’t put sprinter legs onto a 240 lb frame or let a small guy with sprinter legs get run over by those 240 lb guys. It’s not sustainable. I was watching a game a few weeks ago where an offensive linemen went down and the dude was wearing low-low top sneakers that looked like skate shoes. 

[bitonti]

On 12/10/2023 at 8:37 PM, shawn306 said:

Why is it only a MetLife issue ? What are they doing different than say Cincy or Dallas ?

Cincy and Dallas didn't build a stadium in a literal swamp. It's concrete on infill there's no way it's stable 

They just replaced the MetLife turf this year.

It's the ground underneath or lack thereof not the turf itself 

[bitonti]

41 minutes ago, Sperm Edwards said:

The idea that owners don’t give a crap if multiple of their $10-50MM/year elite players go on IR because of shoddy turf is imaginary

They are nfl owners 

The entire business model is them making money off of people who are destroying their bodies for entertainment 

And they get paid basically the same win or lose 

So no they don't give a crap. 

[Sperm Edwards]

15 minutes ago, bitonti said:

They are nfl owners 

The entire business model is them making money off of people who are destroying their bodies for entertainment 

And they get paid basically the same win or lose 

So no they don't give a crap. 

“I am paying $200-250MM a year to my players every single year.”

also

“I know perfectly well this field causes my best players [the better they are, the more they play, the more injury risk they incur] to miss the season and I don’t give a crap about it. I’ll spend $250MM but not $252MM.”

Even if you want to reduce the owner/employee relationship to its most cold and callous business view, they want to protect their product. If the best players are off the field, their product suffers, and with it more ad revenue than they’d have spent to install 15 more grass fields. 

There is no simple fits-all-holes solution, as much as many like to portray it as such.

I have no issues with them going to a grass field. I just think it’s unrealistic and - in a shared field like this in the northeast - may not statistically save net injuries. 

Employees don’t care if their ultra-expensive employees are too injured to perform, Jetblue has mandated Zach Wilson start for the Jets, Woody Johnson is cash poor… lmao.

[ECURB]

29 minutes ago, bitonti said:

They are nfl owners 

The entire business model is them making money off of people who are destroying their bodies for entertainment 

And they get paid basically the same win or lose 

So no they don't give a crap. 

The fact that you actually think these guys don’t have egos is shocking to me.

[bitonti]

12 minutes ago, ECURB said:

The fact that you actually think these guys don’t have egos is shocking to me.

there are 31 losers and 1 winner every year 

winning in the NFL is an ego crushing pursuit, and most (Woody) don't care all that much as long as the checks clear 

13 minutes ago, Sperm Edwards said:

Even if you want to reduce the owner/employee relationship to its most cold and callous business view, they want to protect their product.

the labor spend 200 mil is mandated. They literally have no choice but to do it. 

My follow up why didn't they build a roof to keep the precious players dry? Because they are cheap. 

That's why they built the stadium on abandoned swampland in the first place 

[ECURB]

16 minutes ago, bitonti said:

there are 31 losers and 1 winner every year 

winning in the NFL is an ego crushing pursuit, and most (Woody) don't care all that much as long as the checks clear 

the labor spend 200 mil is mandated. They literally have no choice but to do it. 

My follow up why didn't they build a roof to keep the precious players dry? Because they are cheap. 

That's why they built the stadium on abandoned swampland in the first place 

The players would just strike. This argument of owners being too cheap has no legs. 

[Sperm Edwards]

25 minutes ago, bitonti said:

there are 31 losers and 1 winner every year 

winning in the NFL is an ego crushing pursuit, and most (Woody) don't care all that much as long as the checks clear 

the labor spend 200 mil is mandated. They literally have no choice but to do it. 

My follow up why didn't they build a roof to keep the precious players dry? Because they are cheap. 

That's why they built the stadium on abandoned swampland in the first place 

lmao

Luckily with the push to use less aluminum in society, your personal expense for making new hats should plummet.