Video shows rough Soldier Field turf hours before Vikings-Bears season opener

As we noted last week, Soldier Field was revamped over the past seven days with the installation of new turf after the stadium hosted massive concerts on five consecutive nights from Aug. 28 to Sept. 1. More than 250,000 fans packed the stadium to take in shows from mega bands like System of a Down, Avenged Sevenfold, The Lumineers, My Chemical Romance, and Oasis.

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That immediately raised red flags because of a situation that unfolded last year after Soldier Field hosted two nights of Metallica concerts just days before the Bears played a preseason game. Teven Jenkins, a standout offensive lineman for the Beras, wasn't pleased with the field conditions at the time.

“I didn’t like it at all, really,” Jenkins said, via the Chicago Sun-Times. “It was a little slippery in some parts, and then some parts were sticky.”

Bears kicker Cairo Santos also commented on the sloppy field conditions, noting that it takes a few weeks for the turf to become ideal for football.

Rest assured, the Vikings will be ready for whatever the field conditions are. Head coach Kevin O'Connell said as much during a radio interview last week with KFAN-FM 100.3's Paul Allen.

"This is professional football so our anticipation is the surface is going to be good enough to play on. But I would say this, at some point, the guys in purple and white aren't going to be the only ones playing on the surface so we've gotta do our best to establish, through a lot of different people, once we've arrived, once we've had a chance to step foot, gotta have our players prepared to play on whatever the surface is," O'Connell said.

During O'Connell's first season as head coach in 2022, the Vikings lost to the Packers on a day where players were slipping and and tripping all over the surface at Lambeau Field. O'Connell hasn't forgotten the lessons learned that day.

"We've seen at another location here in the NFC North that happens to have grass and a unique climate, we've seen that surface play a major role before. We want to make sure that we're doing our part to prepare our players. It's something I will talk about with the guys. We'll have the equipment available and we'll go play football," O'Connell said in the same interview.

The crew at Soldier Field is running out of time to perfect the playing surface before Monday's game kicks off at 7:20 p.m. CT.

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