Touch Grass? Mountain West Football and Others Say No, Thanks
“Touch grass” is a popular modern-day insult, essentially a snappy way to tell someone turn off their devices and go outside to experience the real world. Mountain West Conference football kindly rejects the concept.
Six of the league’s members take to a grass playing surface just once in 2023 with Air Force, Colorado State, New Mexico and San Jose State doing so in non-conference competition:
Air Force on Nov. 4, facing Army in Denver as part of the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy series
Colorado State on Sept. 16 when it visits rival Colorado
New Mexico in its season-opener against Texas A&M
San Jose State in Week 0, visiting USC
Meanwhile, each of Hawai’i, UNLV and Wyoming will go the entirety of 2023 without touching grass.
Utah State and Boise State play on grass once each by virtue of visiting the only Mountain West member with a natural-turf surface, San Diego State.
“I know they’re kind of making a big deal about it,” Boise State linebacker D.J. Schramm said of the conference’s outlier.
Boise State has long been the most recognizable program in all of college football, say nothing of just its own conference, for its home playing surface.
However, the blue turf of Albertsons Stadium takes a backseat to Snapdragon Stadium’s Latitude 36 Bermudagrass in 2023.
Snapdragon — which opens its second year as San Diego State’s home Aug. 26 with Ohio University visiting — shares its surface choice with Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium and Oklahoma’s Gaylord Family - Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, among others.
Gracing college football stadiums is a source of pride for the grass’ manufacturers. The official website of Latitude 36 Bermudagrass boasts that “[i]n 2011, following years of testing and narrowing down of selections, Oklahoma State University’s renowned turfgrass breeding program…was adopted by some big-name programs on the east coast.”
For San Diego State to trod the same sod perhaps established it as a big-name program on the West Coast. At the very least, it does put the Aztecs in company more with access-conference stadiums than the so-called Group of Five as a whole.
Indeed, it isn’t just the Mountain West with a dearth of grass playing surfaces. In fact, Conference USA, the Mid-American and the Sun Belt play exclusively on artificial turf.
The American has the most grass fields of any Group of Live with four. That means 10 of the conference’s members in 2023 play primarily on artificial turf (via Phil Steele):
Charlotte, Jerry Richardson Stadium: Matrix Artificial Turf
Memphis, Liberty Bowl: AstroTurf
Navy, Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium: FieldTurf
North Texas, Apogee Stadium: PowerBlade HP & Artificial Turf
Rice, Rice Stadium: AstroTurf
SMU, Gerald J. Ford STadium: FieldTurf
Tulane, Yulman Stadium: UBU Speed Series S5M
Tulsa, H.A. Chapman Stadium: FieldTurf
UAB, Protective Stadium: FieldTurf
UTSA, Alamodome: Fusion H XP2 Synthetic
But an interesting item among the American’s four exceptions — East Carolina, FAU, Temple and USF — is that Temple and USF share home venues with NFL franchises.
Grass, from that perspective, might be viewed as more prestigious. Nearly half of the NFL plays on it — 14 pro stadiums total — and a majority of the SEC takes to grass.
Natural turf comes with a hefty price tag, so it’s unsurprising from that perspective it may be more common in the pros and in the wealthiest conference in college football. FieldTurf’s official website suggests a “cost per hour” discrepancy of $91.20 for grass to $25.74.
How rigid those exact figures are may be disputed, but the general point that grass is more expensive is commonly accepted fact.
To wit, plenty of autonomy-conference programs play in artificial-turf venues, even if some in the program would rather not. Arizona coach Jedd Fisch, a longtime NFL assistant, sighed, “That’s a great question” when asked why Arizona Stadium switched from grass in the early 2010s.
“This is what I was told: We used to have the greatest grass,” he said. “Coach [Rich] Rodriguez wanted the field to always be recruit-ready and always look great. A grass field isn’t always going to look great. So, we went to the turf.”
“We made a decision after the six years when the warranty was out on what type of field we were going to have,” Fisch added, “When you go to a grass field, you limit your amount of opportunities you can use the field. “
The third-year Arizona coach cited camps and clinics with the potential for wear-and-tear on the surface. Use also factors into practice decisions for those programs that do play on natural turf.
“We may be playing on grass and we’re practicing on turf for one reason or another,” San Diego State coach Brady Hoke said. “Part of that is just trying to save the grass as much as we can.”
But does practicing on an artificial surface to play on grass come game day have negative impact? Are the two different enough for the athletes to see a difference?
Considering grass has in the past been cited as providing schematic advantages — Notre Dame was alleged to have grown out its turf to levels that would receive a sternly worded letter from most HOAs ahead of Reggie Bush’s visit in 2005 — an outsider might say yes1.
And there are some advantages to playing on grass: San Diego State tight end Mark Redman said, “It’s a little more forgiving,” while Aztecs teammate and defensive back Cedarious Barfield said grass “is a little cooler than turf.”
Barfield’s statement reminded me of an anecdote I’d heard when covering Trona High School at my first job out of college, working as sports editor for a daily newspaper in central California. As the story goes, the small town at the mouth of Death Valley and onetime hub for the manufacturing of Borax raised funds to install artificial turf.
However, the extreme heat caused the turf to melt and thus The Pit remained America’s only sand football field.
I cannot attest to the veracity of this yarn — a 2009 Los Angeles Times article offers an Occam’s Razor explanation that the Mojave Desert sand would have made upkeep too expensive — but my mind wanders to Trona’s Pit whenever I watch a football game played on turf in hot weather.
Likewise, I think about walking across artificial turf and the small, plasticy pellets that accumulate in the grooves of my shoe whenever I do so. Hawai’i linebacker Logan Taylor addressed my fears of how those pellets feel to be tackled on, saying, “The turf burns hurt.”
However, Taylor said he prefers playing on turf.
“If it’s really good grass, then grass is a better option, but conditions are going to affect the field,” he said.
In much the same way my mind goes to the tale of Trona’s turf, I thought then of covering many soggy Pac-12 Championship Games at the San Francisco 49ers’ home venue, Levi’s Stadium.
I can attest from personal experience just walking on it, the downright infamy Levi’s Stadium grass gained over the last decade wasn’t an exaggeration. Perhaps it’s improved since 2019, but for at least its first five years of existence the turf inside the Santa Clara-based palace was akin to a mansion being floored with warped linoleum.
Really, though, artificial turf has progressed remarkably from the early days of an almost neon-hued brand of AstroTurf from the ‘70s, 80s and into the ‘90s. Offensive lineman Dave Huffman, who played in the NFL across all three decades, described the turf of that era as “nothing more than plastic and concrete,” in a 1994 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on the correlation between injuries and old-school turf.
As far as surface-related injuries in 2023?
“If you’re worried about that during a game, you’ve got some bigger problems,” Taylor said.
Similarly, some Fighting Irish fans and assorted other commentators were apoplectic when the university installed artificial turf in 2014.