Vikings first-round pick Lewis Cine didn’t get much of a chance to make an impression during his rookie season.
The safety suffered a compound fracture of his lower left leg in a Week Four game against the Saints in London and had to remain in England in order to have surgery. Cine has been rehabbing with an eye on 2023 and said in an interview with Chris Tomasson of the Pioneer Press on Monday that he thinks the field at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium played a role in his injury
The playing surface is the “silt-film” turf that the NFLPA believes should be removed from any stadium hosting NFL games. Cine called the turf at the stadium “sketchy” and that he thinks “the odds of something happening on natural grass probably would have been lower.”
“You would think [with] an international game, they would cross their t’s, dot their i’s with the field, but it didn’t happen that way,” Cine said. “There were bumps. When you were running on it, it felt like you were running on concrete, so it’s a bunch of crazy stuff. . . . I can’t say that’s definitely why I got hurt, but I know the field was not ideal at all.”
In addition to the Tottenham stadium, seven NFL teams currently use “silt-film” turf. MetLife Stadium is home to two of those teams and it is planning to change to a different surface after this season, but it will not be a grass surface. The Vikings are another of the teams that currently play on the surface, however, so Cine won’t be able to fully avoid it upon his expected return to action in 2023.