Time capsule #7: football fields with grass (and mud)

In the 1970 season, the Lambert Trophy team played all but its final game on old-school grass. I mean, look at Barry Brink's pants!

Only Penn's Franklin Field had first-generation artificial turf.

We called it "Astroturf" back then because of its famous first application at the gawdawful Houston Astrodome.

About half of the NFL stadiums have grass nowadays. There are mostly artificial turf surfaces in college, since it is so much less expensive to maintain than real grass. However, in the wealthy powerhouses of the SEC, 80% of the stadiums have grass.

Turf looks great on TV --especially compared to the ugly images of Raiders games at the Oakland Colosseum with all the mud in what was earlier in the fall a baseball infield. TV and turf are a natural synergy.

Is it a coincidence that major advances in knee surgery and ACL repairs took off just when football started to be played on artificial turf?

 
We also watched the end of the old straight-ahead style of kicking.

As I remember the championship season, classmate Russ Adams did kick-offs and PAT's the traditional way, but Wayne Pirmann D'72 kicked field goals soccer-style.

There is a great story about the '70 Yale Game. Pirmann played on the varsity soccer team and had a match in Hanover that morning. An alum whisked him down to the airport in Lebanon, flew him down to New Haven, and rushed him to the Yale Bowl. In a roadster. The Yale Band refused to let him practice a few kicks during halftime.

Nevertheless, in the 3rd Quarter, the cold --you might say, ice-water-in-his-veins cold-- Pirmann nailed a 30-yard field goal. Final score 10-0.
One of the linemen on the immortal team, let slip on a Zoom call that the other players didn't consider Pirmann "a real football player."

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