OT :Roger "Deflategate" Goodell wants to make decisions based on science

This is the issue: Grass is a living, changing thing. It requires enormous amounts of care and water. Often, applications of weird stuff, though the science has advanced tremendously. The hippies in the interdisciplinary ecology program at UF once calculated that the UF football field used more water than the city of Kabul annually. (UF has, unsurprisingly, pioneered some amazing grass varieties.) Astroturf is stable, and long appealed to funding entities as cheaper, even when you have to rip it out now and then. You have more major injuries, yes, but my daughter tells me that the newer varieties are safer--you know the manufacturers are working on it. Whether some of those drawbacks are inherent, can really be overcome. . . 

Maybe time to go back to grass; initiatives like this could mean beaucoups of jobs if we wanted to give them to pesky people; the push is usually to remove them from the picture. (Who buys all the tinsel when no one has jobs, I'm never sure.) Football consumes a lot of resources. Lotta paving, fossil fuel, rising and falling seasonal levels of consumption, impacts. Mr. Goodell wants go beyond 'science' and consider the public good. . . might be a fascinating initiative in there somewhere, and some shocking stats, too. I know that the amount of chemicals and harms that went with golf courses used to be enormous, have been addressed some. . .

On a somewhat related side note: Was laughing to my wife about how when it rains and games are canceled thousands of cars have to turn around at Tallahassee's soccer fields, sometimes several nights a week, and make the long slog back to town, sometimes leaving local roads a muddy mess. Lot of expenditure of time and fossil fuel. When I was a kid you walked to your local school for practice, and came home if it was too wet, but usually practiced (and that was fun). There's astroturf there which the adult leagues play on in Tallahassee's Meadows fields where the temps were reaching 115 this summer; cleats were melting.  

The slit-film-style turf is the specific type of turf that the NFLPA called to ban last year. I believe most such installations have been the Fieldturf product, but other manufacturers produce it as well. The differences between types is more significant than the manufacturers.

Ford Field and Metlife stadium both made this change over the offseason, which over time *should* improve the fields and responses to them. 

And the fields were absolutely abominable for 50 years. They didn't call it the "Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field" for nothing; it used to be an absolutely horrible surface in the winter, and Lions fans of Barry Sanders vintage remember him trying to hobble around on that monstrosity with basically no grip to move, run, or cut. 

Even more recently, Miami visited Pittsburgh in a glorious abomination of a football game in driving rain that ended 3-0 due to Somme-quality field conditions and featured a punt that landed in the wet mud and did not bounce. (8:50 of the linked video). That was 16 years ago, when Tom Brady was a veteran. 

Things have gotten better, and I am very much open to arguments that the time has come to work toward getting grass in all stadiums. But there's still some work to do to make that work.