The Seahawks beat the Redskins on Sunday at FedEx Field. But Seattle coach Pete Carroll wasn’t happy with the quality of the turf.
“It was horrible,” Carroll told Brock & Salk of ESPN 710. “It’s a horrible field. It’s as bad as a field can get for being dry. And it’s too bad, it’s really too bad. And we deserve better. . . . We deserve better. . . . It just was worn out. And there was a lot of slipping and all that kind of stuff.”
Though he said that the poor footing affected both teams, Carroll thinks it should never come to that.
“We should just expect to see a better field at that time of year,” Carroll said.
He believes it was even worse than the condition of Soldier Field two years ago, when the Seahawks faced the Bears in a divisional-round game. “There was just kind of dirt on top of the grass, and there just wasn’t good footing,” Carroll said regarding the condition of FedEx Field.
Among those who experienced the bad footing was Seattle defensive end Chris Clemons. His agent blamed Clemons’ knee injury on the “crappy” condition of the turf.
There’s no excuse for anything other than pristine playing conditions at every NFL stadium. The league obsesses over uniformity in every other way. Why not obsess over the quality of the surface on which the game is played?
Until the league insists on the use of the best possible fields in every venue, any further comments regarding player safety should be viewed as self-serving rhetoric. (Then again, many already are viewing those comments that way.)