Since Heinz Field (now Acrisure Stadium) opened in 2001, the Steelers have shared the venue with Pitt. And it often shows.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, the Steelers\u2019 home game was played on turf that looked and played horribly. Kicker Chris Boswell slipped and fell during a field goal attempt. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers called the surface \u201cborderline unplayable<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Former Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger agrees.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t have a professional football team, not just the Steelers but the opponents, play on a surface like that,\u201d Roethlisberger said on his Footbahlin podcast. \u201cBecause you\u2019re paying them a lot of money and if people get hurt, it\u2019s not a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Roethlisberger has a simple solution.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd the only thing I can think of is \u2014 and I\u2019ve been saying this for a while \u2014 I don\u2019t think Pitt should play there anymore. . . . I\u2019m saying this for Pitt\u2019s sake as well. I firmly believe that Pitt should put like a 35,000-person stadium up [in] Oakland. Pack that thing, because when you\u2019ve got 65,000 or 70,000 in Acrisure and it\u2019s only half full, what\u2019s that look like? . . . Put a 25,000-person stadium and then have it just bumping, crazy, loud. Fans everywhere. The students won\u2019t to drive anywhere, they can walk . . . to the stadium, walk to the game, walk back to their dorms. And then you keep them off of that field for the Steelers<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Roethlisberger recognizes that it may not be easy to move the college team, given the taxpayer deal that built the stadium. Still, and as Roethlisberger said, “[T]hey\u2019ve got to figure out how to separate those things and make that field better, because you can\u2019t put that product out there for the best kicker in the game to miss field goals.\u201d<\/p>\n Yes, grass fields are better than turf. But that doesn\u2019t mean grass fields should be bad grass. Every NFL team should play on high-quality grass. It ridiculous that they don\u2019t, especially in the stadiums where the field is already grass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since Heinz Field (now Acrisure Stadium) opened in 2001, the Steelers have shared the venue with Pitt. And…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225819,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-225818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}