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In a radio interview with WEEI in Boston, Patriots coach Bill Belichick blamed field conditions at Reliant Stadium for wide receiver Wes Welker's ACL/MCL knee injury. Belichick called the field conditions "terrible" and "inconsistent" claiming, "When I walked out before the game, I was surprised to see how bad it was."Gee, if he thought the surface was bad, why did he play so many of his key starters for so long? Even after Welker got hurt in the game on a surface he felt was bad?
Though Belichick is complaining about the field, the players in the past haven't. In a 2004 NFL Players Association survey, players ranked Reliant Stadium as the fourth-best field in the NFL. Reliant Stadium is a retractable roof stadium that does not get enough sunlight to grow grass inside the stadium. They have a system of grass trays that they grow outside of the stadium and install prior to games. They have a large inventory of trays, so if one section gets particularly worn they have enough grass to replace it.
"I've always thought our field was pretty good," Texans coach Gary Kubiak said during his weekly radio show on Sports Radio 610. "Just watching the film, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary."
It's sort of ironic that Belichick is preaching player safety as it relates to the grass surface at Reliant when the Patriots, for so many years, played on what has been described as a "barren, grassless pit." Not to mention the poor footing that teams get in blizzard conditions. In 2003, the NFL ordered the Patriots to re-sod the area between the hashmarks for the playoffs because it was in such bad condition. By 2006, Gillette Stadium was in such poor condition that the team finally acknowledged that they needed to switch to field turf.
It is worth remarking that Belichick didn't complain about the field after he won a Super Bowl at Reliant Stadium in 2004.
(HT: Alan Burge, Houston Texans Examiner)
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