Back in late September (right before the Cincinnati game) I had a discussion with an individual who has an oversight responsibility for the athletic natural turf fields at BYU. I posted about his conversation on my FO on October 1. Basically the field conditions we are seeing right now is a result of BYU not wanting to spend the money to replace the grass in the stadium and re-sod the field when it should have been done in 2016 or 2017. And the terrible conditions were predicted by the individual I talked to before the conference season began.

The last time the grass was replaced was 14 years ago. When it was installed, the turf had an expected useful life of 7 years. The primary reason for this is the grass is bluegrass variety, and bluegrass roots, if left in place for many years, do an odd thing. The roots will tend to form clumps in patches. As a result, you get patches of grass where there is a mass of roots under it, and the turf is very stable. Right next to it, you'll get a patch between the root clumps that has very little underlying root structure. These patches are not stable, and if you put a lot of pressure on them, the turf will give way and you'll slip. And you have what you're seeing now.

Basically the prediction as it was conveyed to me was "by the end of the season the field will be in terrible shape. Sod will be coming up in chunks, and players will have a hard time keeping their footing."

The other piece of information he passed along to me was that painted end zones were a requirement for B12 conference games. He wasn't happy about this because it's so hard on the grass in the end zone. But it's why we didn't have fully painted end zones for SHS and SUU, but when Cincinnati rolled around, we had blue end zones for the rest of the home games. This is what actually spurred the conversation. He said the end zones are not going to be in great shape due to the paint, but they don't get much traffic in them compared to the rest of the field. The rest of the field, despite not having the paint damaging the integrity of the turf, was also expected to be in bad shape due to trying to get twice the useful life out of the turf.

It's a very BYU thing to do to try to save a few bucks by not re-sodding the field when it was supposed to be done 7 years ago.