The Bears Den: December 1, 2010

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4988136

An NFL panel found that certain serious knee and ankle injuries happen more often in games played on the most popular brand of artificial turf than on grass.

The league’s Injury and Safety Panel is presenting its study Friday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in New Orleans.

The report examined the 2002-08 NFL seasons, comparing games played on grass to those on FieldTurf. It found that the rate of anterior cruciate ligament injuries was 88 percent higher in FieldTurf games — a conclusion the manufacturer of the synthetic field hotly disputes.

…that the Bears knew full well the trade-offs of their situation.

What do you mean that they ’didn’t have to fund’ their stadium? The NFL ‘only’ ponied up $100 million, if I remember correctly. And the NFL would have given them that money regardless of where they played. There was no site restriction by the NFL for that money – many teams took advantage of the NFL’s largesse in that program. But the total cost of the renovation was about $600 million.

Just consider the stadium size for a moment. We all know that Soldier Field is currently the smallest in the NFL (61,500) because they had to fit the current seating arrangement inside the ‘historic’ columns. Had they built in ‘other places’ as you suggest, they could’ve put in 70,000 or 80,000 seats like Seattle or Dallas, and easily sold out those seats.

So do you really think that the Bears chose to pinch their pennies in stadium construction at Soldier Field on the lakefront rather than building in a larger site, knowing full well that they’d lose the revenue from 10,000-20,000 fans (tickets, concessions, etc) at every home game? That’s ludicrious. And how do we know that the cost of designing and constructing a stadium within the old stadium was any less than it would have been to design a new stadium from scratch and build it on a ‘cleaner’ site? In fact, because they had to play in Champaign for a year, and had to complete the construction of the new stadium during one season and two offseasons, they likely had to accelerate the construction (24-hour shifts, etc), rather than building a new stadium while at the same time playing in the old one. And accelerating construction costs beaucoup d’argent.

I’m not going to argue with you about the McCaskeys pinching pennies at various times during their ownership. But their choice to remain in Soldier Field, sharing it with Park District ownership, rather than moving to an entirely new site, was not a choice to save money. They did it for the fans and for the tradition, and it cost them a great deal of money in construction, in advance sales, and from the very first kickoff in the new joint. That’s a fact.

According to the same article linked to about injuries:

A close look at the panel’s data may not have much effect on NFL teams who know they can save money on maintenance in the long run by using FieldTurf rather than grass.

If the McCaskeys are as cheap as you suggest, we’d already be watching games on an artificial surface. Their choices to remain in Soldier Field and to keep a grass surface have not been based on profits nor pinching pennies.

However, ultimately those choices might cause them to pinch pennies in other areas. At least we haven’t seen evidence of this in the two most recent offseasons, when they surprised the crap out of everyone by trading for Jay Cutler AND signing FA Julius Peppers, among others. And letting Bernard Berrian pound the pavement looks like the right decision in retrospect, also.

…I was simply arguing that the choice of playing in the Chicago Park District’s facility and using natural turf was not one of cheapness.

Maybe the turf could be kept up a little better, but I’d suspect laziness on the part of the Park District rather than the cheapness of the Bears.