Patriots' Gillette Stadium Undergoes Major Field Renovation

The Patriots winning in the playoffs, and hosting two games in the process, delayed this process back a few weeks.

"And we're off," Ryan Bjorn, field superintendent at Gillette Stadium, also posted on Instagram. "Four weeks behind for the best possible reason."

When the Patriots opened up Gillette Stadium back in 2002, they originally played on natural grass. From that season up until the middle of the 2006 season, grass remained the playing surface. It wasn't until the team's bye week that year that it was decided to switch to artificial turf -- for reasons that also didn't involve football.

"The amount of sunlight the field gets after August isn’t enough, because the stadium is tall," Patriots president Jonathan Kraft told The Boston Globe back when they switched to grass. "So the grass doesn’t have a chance to recover after being used aggressively in April straight through January. No matter how good the system is underneath it, no one perfected a way to replace Mother Nature unless you go to an artificial surface."

Back in 2016, then-head coach Bill Belichick recalled asking ownership to make the switch from grass. The Patriots had just suffered a muddy loss at the hands of the New York Jets, and Belichick had seen enough.

The Patriots May Potentially Play On Grass In '26

"If you have a competitive team, you want to give them a chance to play," Belichick said. "You don’t want to go out there and slop around every week and play in a mud bowl. … Those are hard conditions for players to play on because it’s not consistent within the play, or it’s frozen on part of the field and it’s not frozen on the other part of the field. It’s tough to put the players in those situations. At that time, that’s what we thought. I talked to Robert about it. At that time, we felt like it was the best thing to do and we did it."

The Patriots’ first game with the new surface — a 17-13 win over the Chicago Bears — started a run of the team using FieldTurf (or another variation of it) ever since.

However, there’s been a history of the grounds crew making a switch. When the Copa América Centenario was played in Foxboro back in 2016, the turf was briefly replaced with natural grass. After the tournament, it went back to turf.

It's currently unclear if the grass will remain when the Patriots kick off their 2026 season next year.