Two NFL Teams with Long FieldTurf Histories to Meet in Super Bowl LI

Patriots and Falcons relationship with FieldTurf dates back to the early 2000s.

Super Bowl LI will feature a showdown between two teams with long FieldTurf histories.

The New England Patriots (14-2 in the regular season) and the Atlanta Falcons (11-5) will meet Feb. 5 at NRG Stadium in Houston for what could be one of the highest-scoring and most evenly matched Super Bowls in years. The Patriots are favored by a mere three points.

Atlanta installed FieldTurf in the Georgia Dome in 2000 and then replaced that original surface with FieldTurf Classic in 2011. The Falcons opted to keep a good thing going with FieldTurf’s Revolution 360, which will be installed in the new $1.5 billion Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Scheduled to open this July as the team’s new home, the facility also will host Super Bowl LIII in 2019.

Meanwhile, Atlanta’s training facility in Flowery Branch, Ga., has used FieldTurf since 2005 — beginning with FieldTurf XM, which was replaced in 2016 by FieldTurf Classic HD.

New England’s relationship with FieldTurf began in 2006, with an installation at the team’s indoor practice facility. Two years later, the Patriots installed FieldTurf at Gillette Stadium, replacing it in 2010 and 2014. The venue’s current surface, FieldTurf Revolution 360, has been in place since 2016.

Additionally, Major League Soccer’s New England Revolution plays at Gillette Stadium, and the MLS expansion team Atlanta United FC will begin playing at Mercedes-Benz Stadium later this year.

In 2015, an SI.com ranking of the National Football League’s best and worst fields revealed that FieldTurf provides the best artificial surface in the NFL.

Named after the concept of completeness, Revolution 360 is the industry’s first fiber to have achieved a score of 83 on the Fiber Performance Index (FPI). Introduced to the marketplace by Labosport – a leading laboratory dedicated to sports surfaces and equipment – as part of the latest addition to its Certification Program, Labosport’s FPI establishes the ultimate fiber ‘index’ – the rating of an artificial turf fiber, to help prospective turf buyers understand and weigh the individual qualities of a turf fiber.

FieldTurf’s Revolution 360 turf system is also the only one in the industry to score perfect 10’s in the rigorous Lisport test at Penn State University’s Center for Sports Surface Research. Fibers from the turf showed no signs of failure after 150,000 testing cycles.

Learn More on Revolution 360 Here.