David Bakhtiari voices frustration with artificial playing surfaces

When Aaron Rodgers went down with with a season-ending injury on artificial field in the first game of his Jets tenure, the issue of grass vs. turf was brought right back to the forefront for the NFL.

Following the brutal injury break, one of Rodgers’ former teammates, offensive tackle David Bakhtiari, appeared on the Rich Eisen Show to explain why he feels that the NFL needs to go away from artificial surfaces.

“I don’t think there’s a need for it, definitely not anymore,” he told Eisen. “Like the only thing I can wrap my mind around it is aesthetically pleasing for TV and it’s a carpet that’s nice to put platforms on so you can host other concerts and events.”

That’s very common, and far more than half of the NFL stadiums hosted a Taylor Swift concert in 2023. Bakhitari supposes the process of setting up for such events is easier with an artificial turf that can be moved around.

“From a first person’s perspective, someone who’s been playing the game for as long as I have, it sucks,” Bakhtiari added. “No one enjoys playing on it. Everyone’s too scared to talk about it. NFL, just be better, do something.”

The Packers O-lineman is far from the only player to voice such concerns. The movement to rid the NFL of artificial turf kicked back up in the last couple of years thanks to injuries to star players, including a couple of wide receivers for the Los Angeles Rams. Not the least of which is Cooper Kupp, who suffered a season-ending injury last season at So-Fi stadium on its artificial turf, just one year after he led the league in receiving yards.

The day after his injury, Kupp tweeted:

“I believe that we — and all teams — should be playing on grass. This is an age-old issue, and I believe the time to address the problem is now! Let’s have the conversation.”

He added a #saferfields to the end of his tweet, which became a common tag used by other NFL players who pleaded for a change away from synthetic fields. Some of those players include: prominent wide receivers Gabriel Davis (Buffalo Bills) and Brandin Cooks (Dallas Cowboys) and 49ers players George Kittle and Joey Bosa.

Kittle and Bosa specifically have taken action in the past trying to get the NFL to switch to a uniform field surface that is not synthetic, but instead, just real grass. When a number of NFL players filed a petition to ban artificial playing surfaces a couple years ago, the two San Francisco stars were ringleaders in spreading the message on social media, especially after another Ram, Odell Beckham Jr., suffered an ACL tear on So-Fi Stadium’s artificial turf during the 2022 Super Bowl.

An NFL Players Association column authored by current NFLPA president JC Tretter reported that, from 2012-2018, the injury risk, especially with non-contact lower body injuries, was much higher on artificial turf. He noted that “players have a 32% higher rate of non-contact knee injuries on turf and a staggering 69% higher rate of non-contact foot/ankle injuries on turf compared to grass.”

However, ESPN’s Kevin Seifert took the time to comb through more recent data last November — coincidentally, just days before Kupp suffered his injury — and produced the following graph that shows the gap has closed significantly in the last couple seasons:

Data compiled for the NFL and NFLPA shows that injury rates on non-contact injuries to lower extremities are statistically the same on artificial turf vs. natural surfaces. Important context in the ongoing debate. pic.twitter.com/DAsPWBEdqC

— Kevin Seifert (@SeifertESPN) November 9, 2022

Even with a much slimmer margin of difference in 2021 — and decreasingly smaller margins in each of the last four years — the overall difference is still pretty significant over the last decade, given both this graph and what Tretter reported in his NFLPA article.

Now, the issue is back in the minds of NFL players, fans and owners thanks to a season-ending non-contact injury to Aaron Rodgers, one of the league’s biggest names who now plays in one of the NFL’s largest markets.