Inside the NFL Turf Debate

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Stop us if you’ve seen this before: a star NFL player falls down on a turf field –– sometimes without contact –– and clutches his knee or calf before being helped off the field. He’s diagnosed with a significant injury, his season ends, and then social media sounds off, calling on the league to move away from artificial turf. That cycle played out most recently when Aaron Rodgers’ tore his achilles just four plays into his Jets debut. But just how much is turf really to blame for these injuries? And can anything actually be done about it? The answers and solutions aren’t as simple as you might think. Today, Kevin Seifert joins the show to help us survey the field, literally, as we dive into the high-stakes debate between the NFL Players Association, the league, and the local officials that maintain the fields. For more on the NFL’s turf debate, you can read ESPN’s story here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kevin Seifert, take me back to the first Monday night football game of the year.
0:05.7	On ESPN, Bill's at Jets.
0:08.6	Talk me through what you saw unfold.
0:10.8	Well, it's funny.
0:11.8	I was actually at my son's seventh grade football practice with plans to get home and
0:17.3	watch the game from the start on DVR and catch up that way.
0:25.1	And there were a few other dads watching the game on their phones live and I heard them
0:28.9	all scream and I ran over there and watched what I think probably turned out to be the
0:34.6	early story of the season where Aaron Rodgers getting injured on the fourth play.
0:39.5	Aaron Rodgers takes the snaps, drops back, looks over the mid under pressure and he will
0:43.4	be stuck back to the 32 yard line by Leonard Floyd.
0:47.8	And Aaron Rodgers gets up with a limp right now as it looked, 100% right, sitting down
0:53.7	in the field, he's hurt.
0:58.2	So the dads filled you in on this, but when did you actually recognize that the most
1:03.9	significant story of the season possibly would have a secondary story developing there
1:09.8	also?
1:10.8	Yeah, once I saw the video of the play and knowing where it happened at MetLife Stadium
1:16.0	where there has been a ton of discussion about the artificial turf there, some kind of
1:20.3	lower extremity injury.
1:21.3	It looked like he might have got that left ankle twisted as he went down when Floyd dragged
1:27.2	him down, he toe picked a bit, now gingerly walking off the field.
1:35.6	Watching that happen, seeing where it happened, how it happened, I said this is going to be
	...

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