Super Bowl LVII

Field Notes - my thoughts

Super Bowl LVII 

Will Schnell

Odell Beckham 2022

Last year’s Super Bowl field was a hot topic. Remember Odell Beckham tearing up his knee on SoFi Stadium’s plastic turf? Fast-forward to this year’s Super Bowl: The game was great, but our natural grass field played very poorly. We want grass fields to get recognized. However, now we’re front and center, and not in a good way.  

There’s a lot I’d like to talk about with this year’s Super Bowl field, and I think we can learn from this year.

17 groundskeepers picking up divots at halftime

A great mentor of mine, Eric Hansen of the LA Dodgers, taught me this very important rule for a turf manager: “Under-promise and over-deliver.” This applies to field quality, timelines, and budgets. As a turf manager, I always believed in letting the grass shine your light. This year, there was a lot of press for several weeks leading up to the game covering this field. “How great a surface," "this field is Top 2 in the history of Super Bowls,” "game changer," "they've been growing this sod for almost two years," "$800K price tag," etc. The press and social media always look for a confident person to say something bold. The press and social media will run with the statement and build you up, and then once expectations do not match the hype, they will run with it and tear you down. When speaking with reporters, it is critical to manage expectations; this includes coaches, owners, clients, staff, and those paying the bill. Prepare yourself to receive moderate recognition and approval with success rather than being a sacrificial lamb when you and your field underperform.   

I want to write this blog without pointing fingers. I have a heart for turf managers, having been one for over 35 years. Also, growing up on a traditional Missouri row crop and livestock farm gives me the same respect for all the other sod farmers and farms out there as well. 

My girlfriend Toby said to write this blog post like I had one day to live. I told her if I had one day to live, I wouldn’t be writing a blog about turf, but I’d be spending time with family and friends. Then I thought for a while and realized that turf managers and sod farmers are my family and my friends, so I want to talk about this the right way. 

We are so lucky to have this profession! We get paid to grow grass and prepare surfaces for athletes. We get to show off our skills and talents, and someone else is footing the bill. Usually, we are given the appropriate budget to meet expectations. We get to feel and be a big part of a team, organization, and community, celebrating a win or being brokenhearted when we lose. What we do is important! When we do not meet expectations, it seems like the end of the world! We have athletes so physically gifted with size, strength, skills, and talent that they need a surface that allows them to maximize all that is essential. We, as turf growers, almost have to aim for perfection for the playing surface. NO EXCUSES, just results! It only takes one part of the entire grass-growing process to be incorrect to have terrible cascading effects on the entire performance of the field, and that ultimately affects an athlete’s performance. Like a chain, a field will fail at its weakest point. It’s up to us to find that weak area long before game day and strengthen it: we must find the next weakest link in a field, and so on and so forth. When we get it right, we get high fives, and when we don't, we should be the first to step forward and be held accountable. We must protect our industry for this generation and the next generation of turf managers and sod farmers.  

Our product needs to be much better than it was on Sunday, February 12th, 2023, in Phoenix, Arizona, for Super Bowl LVII. 

When I started watching the pre-game warm-ups, I saw there was an issue. It didn’t make me mad; if anything, I was sad. I felt for all the turf managers on site and all the people and companies involved in this field for the last 16 months. Many people reached out to me, asking me what had happened. I’ve been there, in front of 40 million TV viewers and 100K fans in a stadium, watching athletes struggle with the turf I had grown! It’s not fun having ESPN ask me on live TV what happened after the game. You talk about a deer in the headlights - WOW! In my situation, I felt like I let down players and coaches, embarrassing myself, the stadium, my crew, my industry, and the people who had helped get me where I was. I hope if you know someone involved in the field this year, you reach out to them and say, "I feel for you." We always want to align ourselves with winners, but it’s so important when there’s a less-than-perfect field to reach out to each other and stick together. We’ve all had a bad field. We need to build others up, not tear each other down, and most importantly, we need to learn from the entire experience.  

I’d like to go through what I saw and explain to you what I believe happened, not to point fingers but to help the turf managers and sod farmers recognize things earlier so they can make adjustments. 

Usually, a field problem happens for several reasons: 

1) Lack of money to do the job correctly 

2) Lack of communication with events and a turf manager’s change of timeline or event load prior to the game 

3) Weather ( water management ) 

4) Stadium environment; indoor, low light, mostly shade condensation, no air movement

5) Human error 

Misreading the event load and what the plant, growing medium, and environment are telling you, and then making incorrect adjustments from 18 months out leading up to the game day when moisture and compaction issues are present, is a recipe for disaster. 

Here’s what I observed on the Super Bowl field: This is based on turf management knowledge gained over the last 20 years for the Rose Bowl game on January 1st of each year. There are similarities between the Rose Bowl game and this year’s field in Phoenix. Each year, a new field is installed up to 3 weeks ahead of the game and as close as four days prior to the game. The game that my crew worked on had only four days to install sod and paint. That was between the January 1 Rose Bowl game and the January 6 National Championship Game, which we did.  

Our solution after the Rose Bowl game on January 1 was to install new sod on January 2 on top of the existing sod from the Rose Bowl game that had been installed on December 8th. For the January 6 game,  the entire 2.5 acres of the surface were covered with a new layer of sod with a thickness of 2 inches. Other similarities: the weather in Phoenix, AZ, is very similar to what we had in Pasadena, CA. Both used the same sod company (West Coast Turf) with overseeded Bermuda base sod that was grown on plastic. In my case, I used two types of cool-season grass: 365ss Kentucky bluegrass, a 3-Way blend, and a smaller amount of 2 or 3 perennial ryegrasses, both bred and developed by Mountain View Seeds. In 20 Rose Bowl games, I used the Bermuda bases Tifway 419, Tifway II, Bandera, Bulls-Eye, Tifgreen 328, and TifSport. The Super Bowl field this time was Tahoma 31, overseeded with ryegrass. We didn't have a retractable roof or a field that could be moved in and out; instead, we had a fluctuation of daytime and nighttime temperatures that brought dew on the plant around the time of the third quarter, when the sun began to set. Dew was usually gone by 10 a.m. the next day for us, and I believe it’s similar in the Phoenix stadium. When rain was forecast in Pasadena, we had to tarp the field, whereas, in Phoenix, they could close the roof. We had to plan and prepare for condensation from tarping with the use of a wetting agent and irrigation and top dressing management. 

I don't believe West Coast Turf, overseeded ryegrass, or Bermuda grass was the cause of the Super Bowl field's performance. I had a great relationship with West Coast Turf and purchased a lot of sod from them during my three years at Dodger Stadium and 20 years at the Rose Bowl, where I averaged three to four field renovations yearly. The fields were always full; each field was 2.5 acres. If you just count the fields for the Rose Bowl stadium and not the Dodgers fields, it’s 175 acres of sod. The West Coast knows how to grow good turf. 

Rose Bowl Stadium was 1.5 hours from the sod farm, and I was out at the sod farm a lot. I had a ton of say on how I wanted the turf grown. West Coast Turf did a great job working with me; I am very demanding and hard to work with! I have to shout out the four guys that had the patience for my personality and helped the most at the Sod Farm: Tom Stafford, Joe Traficano, Larry Contreras, and the late John Marman. Collaborating with these four professionals was a true gift. If there was a problem with the turf on game day, it was on me and not WCT. I was out at the sod farm two to three times a month, testing and just looking and observing to make adjustments in the process. I knew what I was up against with the event load at the Rose Bowl game and the activity on the field the week of the game. Sod farms don’t have all this information and shouldn’t be held responsible for getting it. It was up to me to ensure the turf and the growing medium were grown and managed so that the end product on game day would be successful no matter what variables were thrown at us. WCT grew some great fields for me, and the ones that were not so hot were due to the guidance I gave them or the decisions I made once the sod was installed at the stadium.  

What I saw at this year’s Super Bowl was the plant giving way (shearing) at a ¼ -inch layer. Why did the plant shear? It looked to me like the field got hard at that ⅛ - ¼ inch layer and the cleat was unable to penetrate into that Bermuda base. I wonder what this field Clegg tested at prior to the game? Probably close to the max limit allowed? Someone wrote that there was too much rye in the field, basing his theory on ryegrass holding more moisture. Once the athlete broke through the surface, the ryegrass released all this moisture, and the field got slick. I don’t think the root of the problem was that the field was slick; I think the turf gave way at the ⅛ - ¼ inch layer, and the players then slipped. Each year across the United States, a lot of rye is overseeded into Bermuda's fields and bluegrass fields that do not play like the Super Bowl field. Another response to that theory is Chad Price’s Tahoma Bermuda, grown on plastic for Soldier Field and installed this past fall, four days before a Bears game, when 3–4 inches of rain dumped during pre-game warm-ups and the first half. There was standing water on the field during the game, yet very few turf divots and very little shearing of the plant. That turf played amazing! I think much more water was in Soldier Field than what was released from the ryegrass in Arizona. A field should be built to withstand rye-releasing water. We need to dig deeper.

When the turf was sheared in Phoenix, you also saw no sand flying in the air, just pieces of grass breaking away, and then the players slipped. A small amount of sand coming up from the canopy when the player’s cleat goes in and out is usually a good sign the turf will play well. In Phoenix's top layer, it appeared to me that the plant-to-sand ratio was off. The cleats only penetrated into the plant, not into a medium of sand and live plant. Players played too much on top of the grass, not down into the sod where the good footing was. Sand, soil, and live plants working together give stability to the field.  Any grass, whether Bermuda, Rye, Blue, or Fescue, that lacks sand or soil for a cleat to grip will give way.  This is nothing new; we have all seen when a field needed a verticutter or fraze mower. The Super Bowl surface may have had too much living plant material in the top layer and not enough sand, causing the plant to collapse. Once the sod was installed at Phoenix Stadium, a possible topdressing and pencil tine blending the cool- and warm-season plants together with sand could have helped to minimize some of the issues I'm mentioning. 

Let’s look at why the field was possibly too hard after that ¼ layer to allow the cleat to go deeper. The first sign, again, was no sand flying when the athlete was barely getting into the turf. Could this also be a moisture issue? Several days before the game, there was a lot of half-time show rehearsal on this field, possibly creating compaction, especially if the field was brought in too wet. Still, again, if the ratio of sand to plant was correct, the field should have performed much better, even with the turf possibly being matted down from the covers from the half-time show rehearsals during the week leading up to the game. 

Plant shearing could also be attributed to the regrowth of Bermuda after the Ryegrass was overseeded. Tahoma 31 is a hybrid Bermuda that was bred to grow in cooler weather. It’s an aggressive plant with very short internodes, almost like a dwarf Bermuda, that creates a very tight canopy. Tahoma grows a lot of rhizomes, which is a great thing, but you need to be aware of that and modify your turf practices when growing this grass on plastic. When you are growing sod on plastic, you are not allowing the plant roots and rhizomes to grow down into more sand or soil. With this Tahoma plant growing all these rhizomes, stolons, and roots in a very compacted area like a dwarf plant does, attention to verticutting aggressiveness and placement and the correct amount of sand to achieve the correct plant-to-sand ratio is essential. When you overseed rye, you continue a light dusting of top-dressing practice to match the amount of Bermuda that will be coming back. If you are growing Bermuda in Phoenix and have a grass-like Tahoma that can grow better in cooler temperatures in the fall during the time this field was overseeded than the Tifway 419s (which have been growing for the last 50+ years), Tahoma’s regrowth vs. 419 needs to be planned for. Plus, if it were on plastic, Bermuda would stay warmer, which equals more growth. Another possibility is that prior to when the field was scalped to be overseeded, maybe the plant growth regulator wasn’t used at a high enough rate to slow down the actively growing Tahoma Bermuda regrowth. Bermuda could have begun to grow back, and the rye could have rooted into the new Bermuda canopy, leaving insufficient sand at the top 1/4 inch. Possibly, after the field got installed at the stadium, a topdressing with a pencil tine could have worked sand into that layer that was thin and needed more sand.

Sod being harvested at 2"

The fields that the NFL's turf managers have created over the last few years during the 18-week NFL season are simply incredible! And seeing the field Travis Hogan of the Chiefs, Matt Griener of the 49ers, and Tony Leonard of the Eagles produced, weren’t they works of art? Hats off to these guys and the other great turf managers who are doing such great work despite the fact that their teams did not make the playoffs or did not have a home playoff game. Thanks, guys, for making our industry look great the entire season. Why do we not have the groundskeepers who grow the grass more involved on the Super Bowl field for the entire 12- to 16-month period of Super Bowl field prep? It has always bothered me that the turf manager in charge of the on-site stadium does not have enough input on the Super Bowl field during the entire sod process.

Andy Levy of the Arizona Cardinals, a great turf manager whom I have great respect for, knows the stadium and environment better than anyone in the world and uses his skills, talents, and experience more than what is currently being done.

Maybe the turf manager of the selected site for the Super Bowl should be the head guy, or at worst, split 50/50 with the NFL representative? This would also build a strong relationship and mutual respect between the two individuals. No offense to the guys that are in charge now, but I think they are being put in an extremely bad situation, and I believe the consequences show up on Super Bowl Sunday. 

I’m not pointing fingers at all here; I just want us to look and see what we could have done to prevent this problem we had. We’ve got the Super Bowl in Vegas next year. It’s the same field type, with a retractable roof and a field that rolls in and out of the stadium with similar weather patterns. We can’t have the same issue. The World Cup 2026 is right around the corner, and a lot of the game fields are going to be sod grown on plastic and brought into stadiums with roofs or retractable roofs that are currently artificial. These fields are going to have sub-surface vacuum systems and grow lights, which give the turf manager some great tools to maximize turf health and playability.

Chicago Bears Soldier Field pre-game this fall. All that water, but played very well.

 photos sources via Will Schnell, personal and online