The Hawkeyes are jumping on the bandwagon and installing FieldTurf in Kinnick Stadium. Iowa will now be the 7th team in the Big Ten to say goodbye to grass. I’ve always thought that football should be played on a field of grass, but I’m willing to give FieldTurf a chance. There are plenty of arguments over which is better, but what it ultimately comes down to for me is that the home field advantage at Kinnick remains strong. So, I decided to look at two things. First, Iowa’s record on grass versus artificial surfaces over the past 5 years. And second, the home field advantage for teams with grass versus artificial surfaces. I compiled my win-loss data from ESPN and the stadium field surface information from Wikipedia.
Over the past 5 season, Iowa has compiled a 38 and 24 record (61% win percentage). On grass Iowa was 32-17 (65%) and on artificial turf 6-7 (46%). While, it looks like grass is obviously the winner here, really a lot of the grass wins have come when Iowa was at home where Iowa was 26-7 (79%). If we just look at the away and neutral site games, there have been 13 played on turf and 16 on grass. On the turf Iowa was 6-7 (47%) and on grass 6-10 (38%). So, if you take away the home field advantage, Iowa was notably better on the fake stuff.
| Site | Surface | Record | Percent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | Grass | 26-7 | 78.8% |
| Away | Grass | 3-9 | 25.0% |
| Away | Turf | 6-6 | 50.0% |
| Nuetral | Grass | 3-1 | 75.0% |
| Nuetral | Turf | 0-1 | 0.0% |
On a national scale, I looked at all 119 (didn’t include Western Kentucky, sorry Hilltoppers) Division I FBS schools. I was surprised to find out that 50 schools have FieldTurf installed and only 53 still have natural grass. The other 16 teams have some other variety of artificial turf including AstroPlay and Wyoming’s Desso Challenge Pro 60 Monofilament Synthetic Turf .
In the 2008 season the home record of the 53 teams with grass was 238-130 (65%). In contrast the FieldTurf teams had a home record of 204-127 (61%). The other artificial turf teams where similar at 62-37 (63%). All of the win percentages were pretty close and I’m not sure if a 4% difference is enough to say the having grass is an advantage over FieldTurf.
One interesting thing to note, however, is that the teams non-FieldTurf artificial turf had a poor road record only winning 32%. Compare that to the 43% win percentage shared by FieldTurf and grass teams and it looks pretty bad. To me, this suggests that teams with a unique playing surface have a hard time adjusting to other playing surfaces.
| Surface | Home Record | Away Record | Overall Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grass | 238-130 | 133-173 | 371-303 |
| FieldTurf | 204-127 | 131-175 | 335-302 |
| Other | 62-37 | 32-67 | 94-104 |
In conclusion, well…I’m not sure. After all that data I sifted through it looks like grass and FieldTurf are pretty similar. I think though, that Iowa has proven it can play well on artificial surfaces and can definitely play well in Kinnick. So I hope that FieldTurf and Kinnick is a winning combination and that the Hawks well have lots of success in the years to come.