That seems insanely wasteful to me, but not in a critical way, more in a sense of commanding respect. Tip of the hat to Green Bay.
I’ve been trying to google up the event calendar for Giants Stadium during the 3 years they tried natural grass, but it’s rough. I did find the current event calendar for MetLife Stadium, though, and that’s illustrative enough, I think. Page 2 shows the tentative pandemic re-schedulings. The original dates were supposed to be:
Saturday, July 18th, 2020 Guns N’ Roses
Wednesday, August 19th, 2020 Lady Gaga
Saturday, August 22nd, 2020 Kenny Chesney
Thursday, September 10th, 2020 Rammstein (?)
Army-Navy Game
That seems like a lot of usage was planned during the preseason and even into the season for a stadium hosting an NFL game every single week.
On the one hand, there’s no law saying you have to book the stadium for concerts and college football games and MLS games. If you shut it down other than the NFL games, maybe grass might work well. Still double the games, but maybe. You’d be kicking out MLS and whatever college games so that’s a bummer, but hypothetically it’s possible.
Even if waving a magic wand to make all that happen, the problem is that it’s the massive stadium 4 miles from Times Square. It’s kind of a big deal to have that stadium there and available for use for major events. It’s not iconic like MSG but it’s a pretty major concert hub. I saw Pink Floyd and The Who at Giants Stadium, plus many Grateful Dead shows. Several more I’m not necessarily willing to admit.
It was practically Bruce Springsteen’s home stadium, selling out 10 shows in July to August of 2003, at least according to the stadium’s wiki page. Ten sold-out Springsteen concerts just before and during preseason?! Yeah, clearly that was back into the turf era.
But exactly that. I’m not a big Springsteen fan, but I’m happy that Giants Stadium was there for him to sell out 10 shows in the summer of 2003. That must have been an awesome summer for the band and the fans. I don’t want that kind of venue taken away so that we can try to save the grass for 20 NFL games and nothing else, y’know? I say fuck that noise.
I will stand in solidarity in calling for a new third generation of artificial turf, but I just don’t see or want natural grass for MetLife Stadium. I want MetLife selling out major concerts with the biggest acts because that’s part of the fabric of life here in the NYC area.