Cooper Kupp to NFL: Get grass fields. ‘There’s people that can make that happen’

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Cooper Kupp has been in this league long enough to know what he wants. And what’s possible.

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He knows NFL billionaire owners are rich enough, technology is advanced enough, for all players on all teams to play all league games on what the sport was meant to be played on:

Real grass.

“That would be sweet,” the 33-year-old, two-time Super Bowl-winning wide receiver said following the fourth practice of Seahawks training camp Tuesday.

That practice was on real grass. Grass that his team’s home stadium, 24-year-old Lumen Field in downtown Seattle, has never had.

Kupp laughed at the issue. Why?

“I’ve been vocal about it in the past,” he said. “It would be awesome. ...

“There’s people that can make that happen.”

Kupp and players across the league noticed the World Cup was played this summer in the United States on temporary, real grass in their NFL stadiums that are turf for football games. That included in New York/New Jersey; Foxborough, Massachusetts; and even indoors in Atlanta and Arlington, Texas. That was because FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, mandated it.

The six matches World Cup matches in Seattle this summer showed it can be done at Lumen Field. But now that field is gone. The turf will be back when the Seahawks hold a Fan Fest practice there Aug. 8.

The Mariners next door at T-Mobile Park show they can play on real grass into the fall in Seattle.

The Seahawks’ groundskeepers maintain three grass fields the team hard-core coach Mike Macdonald had the team practicing on, outside in cold rains, through this past January en route to the Super Bowl. They show football can be played on real grass in the Pacific Northwest in the winter.

“Really, what we need to do is learn the great crew that works out in that shed out there,” Kupp said.

He pointed across the Seahawks’ perfectly manicured grass practice fields to the building where its groundskeepers keep their equipment to maintain those fields.

“It’s a great crew out there. Keeps this grass very nice,” Kupp said.

“And just go ask them, ‘Hey, what would it take?’”

It would take money. The NFL prints that.

An annual report of the Green Bay Packers’ revenue, required to be public as the league’s only publicly owned team, released this week showed the Packers had $453.2 million in national revenue from league-wide media, sponsorships and sharing in 2025. That means the Seahawks made about $453 million last year, too.

The question isn’t can it be done.

The question is, will it?

Will the new Seahawks owners do it?

There’s been much speculation on what the Seahawks incoming new owners might and likely won’t change when they arrive perhaps by early September.

Would the Seahawks’ new Khosla family, whose league-record $9.6 billion purchase of the franchise is pending expected approval by NFL owners in a special meeting Aug. 26, change Lumen Field to real grass?

Talk about good first impressions.

Neeru, Vinod and son Neal Khosla could win over their players — and those of the stadium’s co-tenant Sounders of Major League Soccer — by spending the money to install and maintain grass at Lumen Field.

Yes, through playing football games in the rain on it in fall and winter.

Yes, through concerts, motocrosses and other events the stadiums hosts to generate non-Seahawks revenue.

The NFL cites studies that claim there is no appreciable difference in the number of injuries on turf versus on grass.

The players know differently.

Their union president, JC Tretter, wrote recently that “based on NFL injury data collected from 2012 to 2018 ... players had a 28% higher rate of non-contact lower extremity injuries when playing on artificial turf. Of those non-contact injuries, players have a 32% higher rate of non-contact knee injuries on turf and a staggering 69% higher rate of non-contact foot/ankle injuries on turf compared to grass.”

The News Tribune asked Kupp what his body feels like in the days following games on artificial turf, including Seahawks home games, compared to after games on grass fields.

“It makes a huge difference,” Kupp said. “I know all the metrics and all the data that says whatever the injury rates of this.

“But, I mean, I know how I feel. I think if you ask all the players, they would say the same thing. Whether the injury rates change or not, I know how my body feels after I play on turf, versus grass.

“You can ask the coaches how their backs feel after standing all game on turf versus grass. (But) coaches have a lot of other issues.”

Kupp smiled.

“But it does make a difference.”

Grass is possible anywhere

Pittsburgh’s stadium does it. It holds concerts, University of Pittsburgh football, high-school football playoff games and more in addition to Steelers games on the grass it often replaces mid-NFL season in Acrisure Stadium. Same with cold-climate, Rust Belt Cleveland and Chicago.

Even the “frozen tundra” of Green Bay’s Lambeau Field has natural grass for Packers games. It is over an elaborate heating and draining system below the custom sod. That field is a hybrid of natural Kentucky bluegrass with injected synthetic polyethylene fibers.

In Glendale, Arizona and in Las Vegas, the Cardinals and Raiders play on real grass fields inside their domed stadiums. Those fields are on trays stored outside and wheeled into the domes for the NFL games there.

So, yes, it’s even possible to play on grass in a desert, and indoors. And indoors in a desert.

That, of course, takes money. NFL owners are billionaires by making money, not spending it when they don’t have to.

Fifteen of the league’s 30 stadiums have grass and the other half have synthetic turf. The owners of the teams that don’t play home games on grass love the one-time cost of installing the artificial turf then the additional revenue their stadiums produce holding concerts, monster-truck pulls, conventions and anything else without having to replace the football playing surface underneath the platforms for those events.

Putting it in bottom-line terms: Installing, repairing and replacing real grass during seasons would cut into the profits for the many NFL owners that get handsome cuts of in-stadium revenues from non-football events.

“I don’t know the ‘grassology’ of all that stuff, right?” Kupp said of Lumen Field. “We’ve got soccer teams playing on it. You’ve got a lot of stuff happening there. We’ve got events being hosted.

“I would like to think with all the resources in the NFL we can make that happen.”

NFL players’ union urges real grass

Tretter, the executive director of NFL Players Association, played for the Cleveland Browns. This summer he has made the World Cup in league stadiums the impetus for a renewed call on owners to spend the money to install permanent, real grass for all across the entire NFL.

Julian Love is the Seahawks’ representative to the players’ union, as he was for the New York Giants before Seattle signed the Pro Bowl veteran safety in free agency before the 2023 season. This month as the World Cup was preparing for its final match on the temporary grass in the New Jersey Meadowlands, Love’s former home stadium when he played for the Giants, Love posted on social media about grass fields for all in the NFL.

“Natural grass isn’t out of reach. Prioritizing players shouldn’t be either! We’re #WorthTheCost,” Love posted on his X account @_jlove20 July 17.

That was part of a coordinating messaging campaign by veteran players across the NFL on the issue.

Up to now, this has all been talk, posturing and rhetoric. The players’ union has not made owners install grass fields. That is, the union hasn’t made it an issue at collective bargaining when its contracts with the NFL have been up for renewal.

The current collective bargaining agreement ends in 2030. The league and its team owners want to add an 18th regular-season game, for — you guessed it — billions more in revenue. Most players, especially the more veteran ones, are against that.

If they really care about grass fields, will they make it a collective-bargaining issue?

Leonard Williams says he doesn’t know enough about the issue to answer that. The Seahawks’ 32-year-old veteran defensive lineman has played on turf fields with the Jets who drafted him, the Giants and now the Seahawks over his 11 NFL seasons.

Williams does know this.

“For sure, I think the whole NFL (feels) that way. We obviously prefer to be on grass,” Williams said “It’s less impact, better on the body.

“I understand there’s a lot of things that go into having grass in the stadium that I don’t fully understand yet. But if it was up to a player and it just came down to grass or turf, we obviously prefer grass.”

Kupp wants to keep up the conversation.

Will the new Seahawks owners be listening?

“We, as players, just have to keep voicing what we want,” Kupp said. “We think it’s important.

“But, eventually, I do think it will get done.”

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