The Super Bowl Practice Field Problem Is Part of a Bigger NFL Fight

San Francisco’s dissatisfaction with the conditions provided in Las Vegas alludes to a more overarching complaint made by players for years.

The NFL messed with the wrong team on playing surfaces.

The San Francisco 49ers are an organization committed to keeping grass in their stadium, and coach Kyle Shanahan has been picky about the fields on which he puts his team. And the players, led by one of the league’s biggest names in Nick Bosa, have been militant on the subject, particularly since their 2020 game at MetLife Stadium, when a new, loose artificial surface led to a rash of injuries, including a season-ender to Bosa himself.

Some background here: The NFL secures on-site practice facilities years ahead of time for the Super Bowl teams. In Las Vegas, the Raiders’ palatial new digs were designated for the AFC team while UNLV’s facility were chosen for the NFC team. The Rebels practice on outdoor artificial turf fields. No NFL team does that regularly, which is a real telltale sign in the grass vs. turf debate and a reason why the league committed to laying down sod there.

The problem? The sod was laid down only a week ago and was simply dropped over the turf, giving it a spongy, loose feel, CBS’s Jonathan Jones first reported Monday morning. San Francisco Chronicle’s Mike Silver followed up with more details on it—debunking the idea that the field graded out as a practice field normally would.

It’s not easy to get the playing surfaces right, but the NFL also hasn’t shown in any way that doing so is a top priority.

The reason teams such as the Carolina Panthers and Tennessee Titans are going to turf (despite being in southern climates), and fewer teams are going the extra mile for grass, comes down to the same thing everything else does: money. NFL owners want to pack their stadiums with as many nonfootball events as possible to monetize the increasingly expensive venues. Doing that, in turn, makes maintaining a viable grass surface more difficult, and more expensive.

Given the choice, rather than back off on the amount of events in their stadiums, or spend the extra money to have the right grass surface in place, owners have thrown their hands up and laid down turf. They’ll claim they don’t have data that says grass is safer. But then all 32 teams will only practice outdoors on grass, regardless of whether their games are on turf. And a handful will happily lay down grass fields to accommodate international soccer clubs (in two years, it’ll be the World Cup) that demand it.

At this point, I’d respect it more if they were just honest and said it was about the money. They are businesses, and it is their right to make these decisions.

Either way, what’s happening with the 49ers now is part of a much bigger fight.

• An unexpected call came a couple of weeks after Brendan Daly was fired from Leslie Frazier’s Minnesota Vikings staff. At 6 a.m. on the Monday after the New England Patriots had lost to the Denver Broncos in the 2014 AFC title game, New England assistants Josh McDaniels and Chad O’Shea were on the other line.

Daly was close to O’Shea from their time in Minnesota and knew McDaniels from a year together in St. Louis. The two wanted to see if he’d be in Mobile, Ala., for the Senior Bowl. (Daly already was to interview with the Bears.) Some 17 hours later, at 11 p.m., it was Bill Belichick calling him to see if he could meet the next day. That Tuesday, he sat in the stands with the Patriots coaching staff, talking for two hours. That night, he flew to Boston. Soon, he had the job.

Little did Daly know what was to come.

In the 10 years since, the Kansas City Chiefs linebackers coach has made it to a mind-blowing eight Super Bowls and is working on his second hand of rings, with a shot at his sixth Lombardi Trophy coming Sunday against the 49ers. Daly’s timing, too, was immaculate. He won three titles and went to four Super Bowls in five years with New England, then jumped to the Chiefs in 2019, just in time for their first Super Bowl appearance in a half-century.

“I would’ve told you there’s no way in hell that’s going to happen,” Daly told me during a quiet moment Monday. “I had been through a 1–15 and a 2–14 season in St. Louis not long prior to that. I had just gotten fired coming out of Minnesota walking into that. Really fortunate to have gotten the opportunity. You couldn’t have possibly dreamed of what’s happened.”

Indeed, Daly had made the playoffs just twice in eight NFL seasons, through two stints in Minnesota that sandwiched his time with the Rams. He had yet to register his first postseason win when he arrived in Foxborough in January 2014.

Daly’s 16-year-old son is old enough to remember the past couple of leaner years, plus seeing his dad get fired. But, Daly says, reality for his 14- and 12-year-old daughters is simply making it this far just about every year. Even in the two seasons he didn’t make it to the Super Bowl (2015 with the Patriots, ’21 with the Chiefs), Daly’s teams were in conference title games.

“Their question is, Wait a minute, when do we go to the Super Bowl?” he says. “The reality of their life has been insane in terms of that opportunity. It’s fun. Honestly, I take every one of them and treat it like it’s the first, and it might be the last. I remember what it was like being 1–15 … There are so many people that work their entire career and don’t get an opportunity to do it. I certainly don’t take it for granted.”

In case you’re wondering, Daly says that, yes, there’s an advantage to all of that experience—in knowing how to ramp up your players over the two weeks, manage all the hoopla around the game, and handle all the logistics that go along with it. And knowing it’s not just another game, even for someone who keeps making it here.

• Atop Allegiant Stadium are massive banners with Patrick Mahomes and Brock Purdy on them, which is making this Super Bowl what people make every Super Bowl about: the quarterbacks.

But I was able to get a hold of some analytical data on the two teams that shows the real key to this one may be what happens when those players hand the ball off, and not what happens when they throw it.

We can start with that defensive unit that Daly helps coach. During the 2023 season, the 49ers had the NFL’s most explosive run game, the second most productive and by far the league’s best outside run game. Conversely, the Chiefs were 27th against the run and dead last when teams ran out of 11-personnel (three receivers, one back). So San Francisco’s ability to come out with three receivers, and have Deebo Samuel take a defender out of the box could be a factor in helping it slow the pace of the game down.

On the flip side, the 49ers are allowing 5.8 yards per carry in the playoffs, and a staggering 7.7 yards per on outside runs. Similar to the Chiefs, the 49ers were 30th in stopping the run when faced with 11-personnel. The twist here is that near the end of the regular season the Chiefs mixed more tight ends in to get the run game going, and it worked (5.1-yard average in the playoffs).

Either way, it’s interesting that these two teams have similar issues with defending the run.

• One other game key leftover from my discussions with scouts from other teams: It’ll be interesting to see if the Chiefs open things up again. They’ve recently succeeded in retreating to a more controlled passing team, one that’s relying on precision over horsepower. The 49ers, however, play with a single-high safety a lot, which could behoove the Chiefs to go back to bombs away.

• It was a smart move by the Miami Dolphins to hire veteran defensive coach Joe Barry to backstop new coordinator Anthony Weaver. Barry may have had his bumps in his three stops as a play-caller, but that should only make him a better resource for Weaver in the coordinator’s first go-around at it.

• Shane Bowen’s hiring by the New York Giants ends a drama-filled month of who will run the team’s defense. And it makes sense in that it pulls on the ties between Brian Daboll and Mike Vrabel. Bowen might’ve been Vrabel’s most trusted lieutenant—someone he worked with at Ohio State under Urban Meyer, brought to Houston on Bill O’Brien’s staff and ultimately made defensive coordinator in Tennessee. Bowen’s sharp and creative mind should be a good fit on that staff.

• The NFL’s first foray into South America will happen on Sept. 6, 2024, the night after the opener, with the Eagles playing as the home team in São Paulo, Brazil. And beyond the obvious foray into uncharted territory, which I love, this makes the second time in as many years the NFL is treading onto the Friday ground that’s occupied by high school football. That will be opening night for preps in a lot of states.

• The Patriots’ hire of Ben McAdoo was panned locally and pinned on former Green Bay Packers exec Eliot Wolf, who has since ascended to a top role in New England’s football operation. But McAdoo’s ties to that front office don’t end there—in his last coaching job, as Panthers OC in 2022, he worked with Patriots senior personnel advisor Pat Stewart. There, McAdoo shifted the offense three times as the team switched quarterbacks, weathered his boss’s firing, and helped Steve Wilks build a run game that was one of the NFL’s best over the last half of the season.

McAdoo can coach every position on offense, and he can evaluate. He’s worked with OC Alex Van Pelt, and he’s a good add for Jerod Mayo.

• Detroit Lions GM Brad Holmes has every right to shove his success back in the face of critics. He’s been unafraid to make decisions he sure knew wouldn’t be popular. The result? All five of Detroit’s reps at the Pro Bowl festivities were Holmes’s draftees, and his first four picks in April (Jahmyr Gibbs, Jack Campbell, Sam LaPorta and Brian Branch) played 2,954 snaps this year, and look like major building blocks for the future. So much for the post-draft narratives on taking a back or off-ball linebacker so high.