Keep Texans Talk Google Ad Free!
Venmo Tip Jar | Paypal Tip Jar
Thanks for your support! 🍺😎👍

Reliant one of the top 4 fields? Wow!

G

gcolby

Waterboy
Well, despite all those divots, slippery spots, and dying patches late in the season (see older posts), Reliant was in the top four playing fields as ranked by the NFLPA.

The worst was Indy, and they just got approved for a new field to be installed in the offseason.
 
By the way, after a complete season and 46 posts, I'm still a Rookie??

Who do I have to TALK to around here? :bouncey:
 
gcolby said:
Well, despite all those divots, slippery spots, and dying patches late in the season (see older posts), Reliant was in the top four playing fields as ranked by the NFLPA.

The worst was Indy, and they just got approved for a new field to be installed in the offseason.
Click to expand...

I saw that too. After all the whining and complaining about our field, it ended up being ranked extremely high by the players. To clarify, the poll was strictly about the playing surface...not about the stadium, facilities, etc.
 
People complain about the turf here but I don't know why everyone expects great grass in December. My grass tends to die off and I don't have football teams running around on it. Most people only complain about our grass late in the year but I rarely see good grass on any football field anywhere when winter sets in.

PS I think the "rookie" setting breaks at the 50th post. We enabled custom titles also if you have the desire for another one.
 
I was looking at a clip from the Raiders game the other day, and the turf looked perfect. Then I watched the first half of the Browns game and it looked like a rodeo.
I just believe its a mixture of the winter months, and the grounds crew over watering the turf.
 
The grass looks beautiful early in they year but like Vinny said, it's gonna die in the winter months. I don't know if they are going to change it, but I think it would be easier if they replaced it with the artificial grass stuff..IMHO.
 
i thought field turf might be a good idea but i remember someone saying a year or so ago that the rodeo won't allow that to happen. the grass looks great early but just gets beat up like every other team's surface. it also has to do with light, the crew has to constantly remove the grass to make sure they all get enough sun.
 
OKay, next dumb question. Why was my post moved here? It's about the Reliant Stadium field, so I put it in the Texans Tailgate group:

Discuss anything related to the Texans that is not expressly about the game itself. Community news, player appearances or anything related to Reliant Stadium.

Whereas I passed up The Bull Pen because it says:

Football talk only please.

I ain't whinin', I just want to be sure I understand what's going on here :-)

Thanks,
Glen
 
Is it really that big a deal? I can always move it back if you guys think that this was a strech in this forum.... but it's the off season, and the field relates to the game...Unless you are breaking down the field issues for the marching band.
 
muddy pitch? i don't know what you're complaining about!!! :heh:

county_past20.jpg
 
Nawzer said:
The grass looks beautiful early in they year but like Vinny said, it's gonna die in the winter months. I don't know if they are going to change it, but I think it would be easier if they replaced it with the artificial grass stuff..IMHO.
Click to expand...
The practice field under the bubble is field turf. The players were asked if they would prefer to have that same surface in Reliant and they were almost unanomously opposed to it according to John McClain.
 
The grass for the Super Bowl in Feb. came from a grass farm in GA. Looked GREAT and was green. Maybe we need to have a set of trays for the stadium made up with that grass so they can be put in in Dec. and they would look good. I saw a segment on TV about the grass and it is a very tough grass. Maybe all the trays should be it. Could be we are just using a lower grade of grass.
 
the grass for the super bowl is all show. they just get very green grass to show you on tv, but if you watch the super bowl last year you noticed that alot of players slipping because the grass is hard to plant in. i think the grass for last years super bowl was grown in Arizona and was brought in by refrigerated trucks, i think it cost around $600,000.
 
yeah a link to this article would be nice if ya have one ! If not its cool to know were #4. And i always thought i heard complaints about it from the opposition !
 
Vinny said:
Is it really that big a deal?
Click to expand...

Vinny-

No, not a big deal to me if it's not a big deal to you or another mod. I just want to make sure I'm playing within the rules, don't ya know.

I'll see if I can dig a link up to the original list of fields. It's scrolled away where I saw it a few weeks ago.

Glen
 
Didn't mean it to come across that way. I have some issues with my blunt style of posting.:whew Noprobleemo and thanks for being concerned enough to ask.
 
I would guess that there were probably two polls. One asking for the best and one asking for the worst, and they may not have the same amount of guys answering them. The nflpa release these each year and they confuse me too.
 
I find it interesting that the Cowboys, who have one of the 'next gen' turf fields, are at the worst end of both lists. Other next gen fields, like Seattle, Detroit, Buffalo and Atlanta, fared much better.
 
so what kind of playing surface is the norm? do they vary or are you more talking about the standard to which the same kind of surfaces are being kept?

over here it's pretty much just grass, they have only just allowed synthetic pitches, but there aren't any in the football league and only 1 in scotland.

another thing that has started to become an issue is that as the stadiums over here are typically steeply tiered and cornered in rather than 'bowl' or 'oval' shaped, as the stadiums are becoming bigger and bigger, they grow taller by an incredible rate, which can block out the sun, leading to the grass not growing properly.

also, how often are pitches replaced? chester aint changed their pitch in the 12 years they've played at their current stadium, while the big clubs very rarely change them if something really bad happens.
 
There is no "norm" as such.

Teams that have artificial playing surfaces are moving away from Astro Turf and more towards Field Turf; Field Turf is considerably better than Astro Turf because it has a lot more "give" to it.

Teams that use grass tend to have problems with their fields late in the season.
 
Up until about 5-7 years ago, if a field was artificial, it was plain AstroTurf: a concrete floor with a plastic mat laid across it. Players would seriously injure themselves when planting their feet because the turf would not let their foot 'slip', so as a result you had lots of torn ligaments, etc etc etc.

Then, folks started making artificial turf (FieldTurf, NexTurf) that had a rubberized base, with very long blades of 'grass', the net effect being a more accurate simulation of not only grass in appearance, but in function, i.e. less concussions from heads hitting concrete, and less torn ligaments. That's it in a nutshell.

The old Astroturf fields were typically replaced every ten years. Growing up in Dallas, I can recall when you'd go into Texas Stadium for the first pre-season game after they laid a new surface, and the vivid green would stand out from your memory of the faded old green. Oh, and also they'd try to sell you little souvenir squares of the old turf cut into 1" square pieces, the greedy bastiches.

I'm not sure about the lifespan of the new fields.

As for sun, real grass, and tall stadiums, yeah, we have that problem with Reliant. The south end zone is in perpetual shade. They have to rotate the field out to the parking lot, is my understanding.

I'll shut up now and go to bed.

Glen
 
I notice the field does look crappy at the end of the year just like every other team's. I would like to see some field turf in Reliant though ..... like Seattle's and Baltimore's . Those two teams field's look really good , I like the dark color . But when you look at N.O and Atlanta's they look REALLY fake . Are there different types of field turf ?
 
Cincinnatikid said:
I was kinda confused by the best playing fields vs. the worst playing fields. shouldnt they just be the exact opposite basically?
Click to expand...
Yup, "exact opposite" or inverse is what you'd expect. Don't mean to sound ungrateful for the info, but it kinda loses credibility since one poll is not the opposite of the other.
 
TexansCanes said:
the grass for the super bowl is all show. they just get very green grass to show you on tv, but if you watch the super bowl last year you noticed that alot of players slipping because the grass is hard to plant in. i think the grass for last years super bowl was grown in Arizona and was brought in by refrigerated trucks, i think it cost around $600,000.
Click to expand...

Also the super bowl grass is grown for ONE game. It is torn up and thrown away after the game. It would not hold up for a long period (multiple games)
It is basically a hybrid bermuda and ryegrass mix. You can overseed with ryegrass to keep the green appearance during the winter months but the more ryegrass you use the more slippery the field becomes.
 
nunusguy said:
Yup, "exact opposite" or inverse is what you'd expect. Don't mean to sound ungrateful for the info, but it kinda loses credibility since one poll is not the opposite of the other.
Click to expand...

There shouldn't be any loss of credibility because they asked two different questions and you should expect different answers. First, it is human nature--if you ask a group of people "how short" and "how far" a distance something is you will get different averages. Second, people can have lots of different reasons for feeling fields are either worst or best to play on so there is no reason to believe all the people who voted Field #1 to be best also agreed on Field #2 as worst. Instead they will split up on a bunch of different fields as worst.
 
Texan Gal 312 said:
Also the super bowl grass is grown for ONE game. It is torn up and thrown away after the game. It would not hold up for a long period (multiple games)
It is basically a hybrid bermuda and ryegrass mix. You can overseed with ryegrass to keep the green appearance during the winter months but the more ryegrass you use the more slippery the field becomes.
Click to expand...

Thanks TG for the grass mixture lesson. I was a proponet of the SB grass for our trays late in the season, but now that doesn't seem like to good of an idea. It also explains why we saw a lot of folks slipping on it.
 
nunusguy said:
Yup, "exact opposite" or inverse is what you'd expect. Don't mean to sound ungrateful for the info, but it kinda loses credibility since one poll is not the opposite of the other.
Click to expand...

What are your favorite three colors (from blue, white, black, red, green, gold, silver, purple, orange):

Player 1: Red, White and Blue
Player 2: Blue, Red, Black
Player 3: Black, Green, Red
Player 4: Silver, Blue, Black
Player 5: Purple, Gold, White

5 points for #1, 3 points for #2, 1 point for #3 yields:
Blue: 9, White: 3, Black: 7, Red: 8, Green: 3, Gold: 3, Silver: 5, Purple: 5, Orange: 0

So the group's favorite color ranking are Blue, Red, Black, Silver, Purple, White, Green, Gold, Orange.

Now ask the same 5 players the colors they can't stand:

Player 1: Purple, Orange, Gold
Player 2: White, Purple, Orange
Player 3: Blue, Orange, Silver
Player 4: Purple, Green, Red
Player 5: Orange, Blue, Green

Blue: 8, White: 5, Black: 0, Red: 1, Green: 4, Silver: 1, Purple: 13, Orange: 12

So the group's most hated color rankings are Purple, Orange, Blue, White, Green, Silver, Red Black.
 
Seems the Steelers players had the same familiarity with FieldTurf (in their practice facility) and also did not want to put it on Heinz Field:

"We didn't do any actual survey," Rooney said, "but we talked to some of the players about our field and whether to put in FieldTurf. None of them said they'd rather go to FieldTurf. They complain little about our field."

The top four fields in the players rankings were all-grass surfaces in Tampa Bay, Arizona, Carolina and Houston. No. 5 Seattle has FieldTurf. Indianapolis, ranked at the bottom of the 31 NFL fields, will replace its 8-year-old AstroTurf with another synthetic surface this year.
Click to expand...

Interesting solution they are installing though--wonder if it would work with trays:

Workers scraped off a half-inch of topsoil and planted new sod in a complete makeover at Heinz Field. The hybrid field, mostly grass with woven synthetic fibers to help anchor the sod, had come under criticism by NFL players because the grass wore out.

The Steelers considered installing an artificial surface such as FieldTurf, which they have at their UPMC indoor practice field. They opted for the hybrid grass makeover instead after talking to their own players and observing the experience of the Denver Broncos at Invesco Field, which also has the DD GrassMaster system and had a similar overhaul a year ago.

"Denver did this last year and was very happy with the result," Rooney said. "We hope that we get the same kind of result, that the field will be stronger."
Click to expand...

Sounds like both Denver and Pittsburgh didn't get the system right the 1st time but Denver has fixed it and Pittsburgh is following suit.

Link
 
This shouldn't be a suprise. It's a brand new (EXPENSIVE)stadium. Brand new field, and we have a retracting roof. So the field does not take as much punishment as the other grass fields.
 
I find this all very interesting, considering that Charley Casserly, in response to a question by a listener on 610 AM, said that the field at Reliant for the Cleveland game was "totally unacceptable". And he had conviction, if not downright anger in his voice when he said it.

He went on the say that next season, the "county" will be buying an additional 700 trays of turf to go from one and a half to two and a half football fields worth of trays that can be changed out.

He said that he "hoped" that it would fix the "problem". But instead of conviction, he had the tone of resignation in his voice. I got the distinct impression that he's pissed off that he's got no control over the field situation, and that they're pouring more money down a rathole.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top