It’s a good thing the University of Phoenix doesn’t have a football team.
The Arizona Cardinals play in a state-of-the-art stadium named for the college that doesn’t play college football. It has a fancy system for sliding the entire playing surface outside, allowing for plenty of care and feeding to be provided to the 120-yard-by-53-yard swath of grass. And in Week One of the regular season, that swath of grass looks more like desert than grass.
The problem, as explained by the team, is that the Cardinals hold training camp in the stadium, which means that it takes time early in the year for the grass to recover from an aesthetic standpoint.
“Performance wise and in terms of playability there are no issues,” a team spokesman said. “Footing and performance is still optimal but appearance admittedly is not.”
After 22 practices during camp and one of two preseason games, the center of the field was resodded. Beyond the strip of new turf, which looks fine, the reast of the field has large, noticeable bare spots.
“We’ve since been in the midst of a particularly lengthy stretch of high temperature that wasn’t helpful in allowing the field to bounce back,” the team said.
At a time when player safety has taken on more importance than ever before, it’s critical that all playing surfaces ensure that players will be able to plant and to cut and to run without losing their footing. Even then, it helps from a TV presentation standpoint if the fields look good, and FieldTurf looks a lot better than the surface on which the Saints and Cardinals are playing on Sunday.
