Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis takes plenty of heat for the way he runs his team, but he goes with grass fields.
The NFL has recently been the spotlight for the quality of the field surfaces the league provides for players, with multiple owners bending over backwards to provide more expensive grass playing fields for the World Cup games they’re hosting. Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis spoke out about the grass surface at Allegiant Stadium, and according to a report Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk, the league probably won’t be happy about his comments.
“I just always felt that football should be played on grass,” Raiders owner Mark Davis told Perez. “That’s for safety purposes, No. 1. I want it to look like a game was played even if it’s an indoor field. You see grass stains and everything else. I wasn’t going to a stadium without it being grass once I knew that capability was there. Obviously, it added a lot of cost, but it’s worth it.”
The Raiders may run their operation like an ongoing exercise in chaos management, but they do back it up to at least some extent when it comes to player safety.
The latest example of this happened with defensive end Maxx Crosby, who was shut down late last season due to his knee issues, although there are also questions about whether that was done to keep Crosby from reaching expensive roster bonuses.
The ongoing artificial turf vs grass debate is an entirely different matter. The league is happy to let owners pay to install grass fields given the money that both teams and the league is earning from the explosively popular event, but that doesn’t mean they actually want to keep doing these grass installs, some of which are wildly expensive.
It’s yet another example of the NFL being all about the money, which isn’t exactly front-page news these days. It’s been that way for a long time, and it’s not going to change.
What remains to be seen is whether this particular debate is going to change the game with regard to the surface it’s played on. The owners’ shallow arguments about turf being safe have been exposed in a big way lately, and Davis’s comments won’t help the ongoing back and forth at all.
The Raiders owner doesn’t seem at all inclined to save some money by shifting to turf, which is somewhat unusual given that Davis is reportedly one of the most cash-strapped owners in the NFL. Davis has announced his succession plan, but for the moment Raiders players can be thankful about playing on the safer surface.
