Insider blasts NFL owners after Aaron Rodgers injury

NFL insider Jason La Canfora blasted league owners for making players compete on turf surfaces rather than on natural grass fields after the New York Jets lost star quarterback Aaron Rodgers to a season-ending torn Achilles at MetLife Stadium on Monday night. 

"I think it is nothing short of shameful that these billionaires, who make hundreds of millions of dollars each year — hundreds of millions of dollars each year — and who sell their teams for billions more than they bought them for," La Canfora ranted during the latest edition of the "In The Huddle" podcast, per Ryan Gilbert of Audacy. "It’s shameful that they won’t do a bare minimum, won’t do a modicum of what I would deem to be necessary things to protect their greatest assets, which are their players, by playing these games on God’s green grass and not these artificial surfaces that are built to save owners money." 

The old MetLife Stadium turf was blamed for multiple injuries suffered by players over the years, but that venue has a new FieldTurf Core system that was praised by Rodgers over the summer for being "one of the best surfaces I’ve seen that’s artificial." It's also worth noting that some within the football community such as former Jets quarterback and current "The NFL Today" analyst Boomer Esiason believe Rodgers should've avoided the contact that resulted in the future Hall of Famer being carted off the field after just four snaps on Monday evening. 

Nevertheless, it's hardly a secret that NFL owners stick with artificial/synthetic turf over grass to save money even though, as Pro Football Talk mentioned in June, "players strongly prefer grass to turf." La Canfora pointed out that owners also embrace turf over grass to hold events such as concerts at stadiums throughout any given year. 

"To make these stadiums as multi-purpose as possible to make their maintenance as cheap as possible to make them as usable as possible to make them as homogenized as possible so we don’t have to deal with individual things the way you would have to with grass," La Canfora added. "That’s it. That’s the purpose they serve." 

The NFL Players Association has repeatedly campaigned for owners to switch to natural grass to better protect players paid millions upon millions of dollars each year. With the current collective bargaining agreement set to run through the 2030 season, however, players realistically can't do much to change owners' spending habits anytime soon.