Seahawks coach Pete Carroll has disparaging words for Levi’s Stadium

During the AstroTurf craze of the late 1960s, baseball slugger Dick Allen famously stated, “If a horse can’t eat it, I don’t want to play on it.”

Dick Allen, meet Seahawks coach Pete Carroll.

Appearing on his ESPN Seattle radio show Monday, one day after the Seahawks lost to the 49ers in Santa Clara, Carroll said the Levi’s Stadium playing surface was as he expected: “really lousy.”

To the point of being equine-unfriendly?

“It wasn’t great. There were guys slipping all over the place and you could see guys in pass protection, you could see guys on field goal protection sticking their cleats in the ground and it was moving. It’s the same on both sides of the ball, though. They’re subject to the same turf that we are, so there’s no reason to complain about it,” said Carroll, complaining about it.

“I thought it was going to be that way,” he added. “I told (Seahawks players) it was going to be really lousy.”

Issues with the Levi’s field go back to the facility’s earliest hours. The first game there, an exhibition contest between the Broncos and 49ers in 2014, featured chunks of grass moving and clumping. A few days after that, then-49ers coach Jim Harbaugh shut down a practice session because of the slip-n-slide turf. The 49ers replaced the field twice that season, and again in 2015. They replaced the entire field in preparation for the Super Bowl in February 2016.

It’s not just a Levi’s thing. The 49ers had trouble with the playing surface at Candlestick Park almost immediately after the bleached, hideous AstroTurf field was ripped out and grass reinstalled in 1979. In the early 1980s, the team employed a sod squad, men who would race onto the field during commercial breaks and stomp the grass back into place as best they could.

The most memorable football game ever played at Candlestick was subjected to perhaps the worst field conditions. Torrential rain in January 1982 turned the field into a bog. When it came time for the game in which Dwight Clark made The Catch, vast patches of the field were covered with cat litter spray-painted to look like a grass field.

“Whether it was Kezar (Stadium) or Candlestick (Park) or this place, Northern California, whatever it is the fields just are always treacherous,” said Carroll, a San Francisco native.

Carroll, in bashing the Levi’s field condition, acknowledged the rain that fell throughout Sunday’s game was a factor — again, the same factor for both teams.

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“When we got out there in pregame, it looked like a pretty good turf,” said. “They had redone the middle part of it a couple weeks ago and it felt like it was going to be a good turf but it didn’t work that way. You could see guys couldn’t dig in. We were prepared for it to be a difficult turf, and it still was a factor.”

That said, all sides agree it was not a factor on this play:

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