Mike Celizic

There is no excuse — none — for the conditions the Pittsburgh Steelers provided for their game Monday Night against the Miami Dolphins. It was a travesty of football and an insult to the NFL, the players, the fans, and anyone who turned on a television in the hopes of enjoying Monday Night Football.

It was a disgrace.

The announcers kept talking about old-school football and summoning the names of the Chicago Staleys and Canton Bulldogs from the earliest days of the league, but that was an insult to those teams and those times. I’ve seen old-school football in old Cleveland Stadium in the days before modern drainage and turf science. Those games were played in mud. This one was played in a bog.

“It was ugly,” Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said of his team’s 3-0 win over Miami, but that was an injustice to the concept of ugly. This game was to ugly what a can of Spaghetti-O’s is to dinner at Rao’s in New York. It was beyond ugly, beyond hideous, beyond unwatchable. Anyone who voluntarily sat through Monday night’s game without a rooting interest has a threshold of boredom that’s off the charts.

Roethlisberger said the field was the worst he’s ever played on and called it “ridiculous.” And this was his home field he was talking about.

Give the man credit for honesty. It was and is ridiculous that in this day and age an NFL football team can not provide a fit field to play on.

This isn’t about bad weather or unforeseen calamity. The caretakers of Heinz Field knew exactly what was coming and they couldn’t cope with it. They had four high school games last Friday and a Pitt college game on Saturday, a schedule that left the field in tatters. With the Steelers due to play on Monday night and bad weather moving in, they didn’t replace the existing field; they laid new sod on top of it

Doing nothing at all would have been better. At least then the battered old field would have drained. We would have had bare spots and some mud, although not a lot. Modern fields are built on a sandy base on top of gravel and drainage beds that can suck up four inches of rain an hour or more. But lay two inches of sod on top of that and you have what we saw Monday night — a field that even the Canton Bulldogs would have found to be unplayable.

Why the NFL allows such travesties is a mystery. The league fines players for an untucked shirt tail. It dictates the size of logos, tells players when they have to be available to the media, lays enormous fines on a coach caught cheating.

But it can’t demand that a team provide a playable field?

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Nothing is more important to the game than the field. I can’t believe I even had to write that sentence, because it’s as obvious as a zit on a prom queen’s nose. But the NFL apparently doesn’t get it.

The league had to know what was going on in Pittsburgh with the field. It had to have the ability to save the Steelers from themselves and the game from the embarrassment of Monday night.

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It’s not as if lousy field conditions are something new at Heinz Field, which has consistently had one of the worst fields in the league ever since it opened. This isn’t an ancient hulk of a stadium; it’s practically brand-new. There simply is no excuse for not being able to provide a decent field.

I applaud the Steelers for wanting to have a grass field. There aren’t that many of them around, and they remain the best of all surfaces. But other teams have had the same problems Pittsburgh has had with grass, most notably the Jets and Giants, who share a stadium in New Jersey.

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Originally, Giants Stadium had an Astroturf field laid over asphalt, a surface that proved to be perhaps the worst ever invented. The stadium finally switched to grass, but that surface couldn't stand up to the Jets and Giants sharing the field along with high school championships and the occasional Army-Navy game. Summer rock concerts didn’t help, either.

The Jets and Giants and their landlords, the N.J. Sports and Exposition Authority, tried every technology possible to make grass work, including installing a modular field put together of hexagonal pallets that could be replaced as the surface wore out. It was an ingenious solution with just one tiny drawback — it didn’t work.

Unwilling to continue providing the worst field in the league, the Jets and giants finally switched to FieldTurf, the most grass-like and player-friendly surface now in use. New England, unhappy with the condition f its grass field, also switched to FieldTurf.

I appreciate the Steelers’ desire to play on grass, but it’s not working. And if the team won’t take steps to change to a field that remains playable — we’re talking FieldTurf here — then the league, which governs everything about the game, has to step in and order the change.

Otherwise, one day this is going to happen in the playoffs, and that’s not what anyone wants.

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