The potholes, some as deep as six inches, made the going tough last Sunday at Ericsson Stadium -- and we're not talking about the tailgate traffic in the parking lot.

	A referee removes a large section of damaged turf from Ericsson Stadium's field on Sunday.

"There's no footing -- I mean none," said Green Bay Packers backup quarterback Doug Pederson after the Packers handled the Carolina Panthers 28-7. "You watch the linemen pass block and the defensive line pass rush ... it's like everyone is on skates. You can really get hurt on that."

Several players blamed the broken leg of Carolina linebacker Dan Morgan, this year's first-round draft choice, on the tattered field at Ericsson.

Asked to rate the field conditions on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst, Green Bay place-kicker Ryan Longwell said Ericsson was "about a 12 or a 14."

The dimensions of a football field -- 120 yards by 53 1/3 yards -- have been cast in stone for more than a century. But the surface is as varied as the 31 NFL franchises themselves.

Football, a game of violent collisions, is tough to begin with; the average career of a player lasts little more than three seasons. In the minds of the players, artificial turf can shorten careers and lead to injuries. Still, with 10 of the league's 31 venues still utilizing artificial turf -- six of them domed stadiums where growing grass is not yet feasible -- the dangers are an old story.

Now, however, with the recent problems in Charlotte and Philadelphia, players are complaining anew about the league's unlevel playing fields. They believe it is a universal issue of the right to safe working conditions.

"One of the things I've personally argued with the league about is we have no standards for playing surfaces in the NFL," Clark Gaines, a regional director for the NFL Players Association, told the Charlotte Observer. "Anybody who grows grass out there and is a used-car salesman can contract with a club to put in an experimental surface and use the players as guinea pigs. I've said on several occasions we've got to have a criteria for the fields to meet, and then enforce it.

"We need to act on this issue and we need to act now. More and more players will impose themselves and not expose themselves to injury. If they see conditions like this, they'll just say they won't play the game."

That's exactly what happened before the Aug. 13 preseason game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Baltimore Ravens at Veterans Stadium. During the transition from baseball to football, workers filling in the four cutouts around the bases couldn't make them even with the rest of the artificial NeXturf field. As a result, the game was canceled.

	“	It was like a big, cheap mat that says 'Welcome' on it. I'd rather play in the parking lot than on that stuff. ”
		— Eagles defensive end Hugh Douglas on Veteran Stadium's artificial turf

"It was like a big, cheap mat that says 'Welcome' on it," Eagles defensive end Hugh Douglas told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I'd rather play in the parking lot than on that stuff."

As it turns out, there is no standard for playing surfaces in the NFL. Game officials are required to check each of the league's fields early in the season, but there are no specific requirements other than dimensions.

"There are so many variables," explained Doug Bradley, the Cincinnati Bengals' head groundskeeper. "The guys in Florida face a totally different set of conditions than the guys in Cleveland or Seattle or Green Bay. You can't really set a standard for all those different places."

According to Greg Aiello, the NFL's vice president of public relations, the NFLPA has not formally broached the subject of standards for playing surfaces.

"We would sit down and be prepared to discuss it, as we do with all issues," Aiello said earlier this week. "If they had a point of view, we would listen. It doesn't mean we have to agree with them."

Tim Davey, the league's assistant director of game operations, worked closely with the Panthers to resolve the problem in time for the Oct. 14 game against New Orleans.

"We're working in a support role to provide information and resources," Aiello said. "We're not in charge of the fields. The responsibility falls to the teams. They have to get it done."

Chain of events
The fragile shelf-life of an NFL field is framed nicely by an NFLPA survey taken last fall. NFL players rated the grass field at Ericsson Stadium as the league's second best among 30 venues, behind only Tampa Bay's Raymond James Stadium.

	A Carolina Panthers ground crew member works on the damaged sod in the middle of the field at Ericsson Stadium on Sunday.

And then, suddenly, pieces of grass the size of manhole covers began to come loose.

"In five or six years in this stadium, I've never seen conditions like that," said Panthers wide receiver Muhsin Muhammad. "I was totally shocked."

Growing grass, as anyone with a front lawn knows, can be a ticklish business. Weather, almost always, is the key factor in agronomy. The failures in Carolina and Philadelphia, as well as last season's problems in Cincinnati, followed a chain of events that the Weather Channel didn't see coming.

A number of southern teams employ a combination of Bermuda grass, which thrives in heat, and rye. When the Panthers experienced a cool summer, the Bermuda grass that was planted last spring didn't mature quickly enough to overrun the rye that is sown each fall to keep the field looking green. When the field at Ericsson grew brown and developed bare spots during the preseason, Carolina laid a 10-yard-wide strip of new sod down the center of the field.

The sand-based sod was three-quarters of an inch thick and probably would have taken hold if the weather had cooperated. But with unseasonal overnight temperatures in the 40s, the Bermuda grass never took root. The result was a monumental failure that had 23 grounds personnel scrambling, sometimes comically, to replace all divots.

Carolinas Stadium Corporation president Jon Richardson, son of owner Jerry Richardson, said he was embarrassed.

"We take a lot of pride in the field," he said, "but it's just not where we want it to be."

Thicker turf would have eliminated the problem, but it is more expensive. Carolina officials insist that money was not a factor in the decision. The team also said that the absence of former groundskeeper Billy Ball, who was fired late last season, was not a factor. Nevertheless, his replacement, Tom Vaughan, has no experience with turfgrass management, according to the team's official biography.

On Friday, the Panthers began the 24- to 48-hour process of installing DuraTurf, a thicker, sand-based sod from a company based in Richmond, Va.

"We were looking for something that didn't have to root in," Richardson said. "That's no longer an option. There's no way the weather's warm enough for it to do that. We knew we had to get something heavy enough to stay in place."

The other major field debacle occurred in Philadelphia, but grass was not the culprit.

	Ravens quarterback Randall Cunningham inspects repairs on the turf at Veterans Stadium.

The field at Veterans Stadium -- dubbed the Field of Seams -- long has been the most reviled among NFL players. It was the No. 1 vote-getter for worst field in last fall's survey. The loose, ragged seams left athletes wary. The conditions moved NFLPA executive director Gene Upshaw to demand a change after last season.

The City of Philadelphia, which owns the stadium, spent $1.8 million for NeXturf, a new surface composed of 1-inch blades of synthetic grass on a rubberized base. The weekend before the Eagles' first preseason game, scheduled for a Monday night, was a rainy one, and when workers covered the baseball cutouts with turf patches they bubbled, prompted by hot weather, as high as three inches. That left the turf over the four bases soft and lumpy.

When Joe Martz, Philadelphia's managing director, asked his capital program director, Rick Tustin, who was to blame, Tustin answered, "God."

Martz said that in 30 years of managing Veterans Stadium and the 200-odd conversions from baseball to football and vice versa (30 to 40 in one day's time), it has never, ever rained.

"If there's water in the cutouts, we've always had time to let the sun bake the clay and let it get hard again," Martz said. "But it rained and we did the best we could. The temperature under the turf reaches 200 degrees. To say that the water doesn't come to the surface is ludicrous -- it has to."

The solution was to lay temporary asphalt in the sliding areas and cover it with dirt, followed by the turf patches. Even with that problem solved, the field is still uncommonly slippery. The St. Louis Rams, for instance, brought 200 pairs of shoes to the Philadelphia opener, four styles for each player.

Rams running back Marshall Faulk called the turf "iffy" and said he tried to avoid making sharp cuts -- the very thing that got him voted as last season's MVP.

Martz' learning curve concerning the faux Bermuda grass has been steep. He knows that presentation, as always, is in the eye of the beholder.

"The Phillies like the grass more matted, they say it gives them a truer bounce of the ball," Martz said. "The Eagles like the grass standing up a lot straighter. I have no idea why."

Enter sand men
There were times during the last two home games in the inaugural season at Paul Brown Stadium when players were running on sand.

"You mean that dirt-bike track?" Jacksonville running back Fred Taylor said before the Dec. 17 game at Cincinnati.

"He's going to call it a lot worse than that after he's been here, I guarantee you," Bengals quarterback Scott Mitchell said. "It's really bad."

The disaster in Cincinnati came about after a series of unlucky weather events. First, a drought hit the East Coast and the field the team ordered from S.W. Franks of Cleveland died because of a watering ban in the Baltimore area. The Bengals installed a three-quarter-inch Bermuda grass field in June, hoping it would hold up for a season until the original field was ready.

"Bermuda likes hot weather, but last summer was probably the cruelest, coldest summer we've seen in 30 years here," said Bradley, the Bengals' groundkeeper. "The Bermuda never took off, never created a thick layer. Then in December, it got colder than it should have. The Jacksonville game had a wind-chill of minus-10 or -15, the second-coldest Bengals game ever.

"It tore up quick."

In May, the high-tech Kentucky bluegrass sod finally arrived and has weathered all challenges. It's natural grass that was sewn into a synthetic binder, which holds it snugly in place -- a first in the NFL.

"We took a gamble last year, and we got bit," Bradley said. "Groundskeepers get bit by the weather more than anyone."

Last season was also the first for grass at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. After 24 seasons of artificial turf, the Giants decided to go with player-friendly grass. Because Giants Stadium is a multipurpose venue that also plays host to college football games, soccer matches and concerts, versatility was important.

The solution was the ITM Tray system, or Integrated Turf Modules. The field requires 6,300 trays, all 48 inches square, 12 inches deep with a weight of 1,100 pounds. The idea was to rotate four sets of trays to keep the field fresh.

"Our system is four times as complex as anything that's been tried before," said Scott Clark, president of Clark Companies in Delhi, N.Y. "We clearly had a success, but did we have some issues? Yes. We had one mature set of trays, but there were those unexpected XFL games and a playoff season for the Giants. And, unlike the other stadiums, we have a game every week with the Giants and Jets. The mature grass was tired after two weeks, then the new trays of bluegrass had the same problem they had in Carolina. One month isn't enough to set."

Now, the trays have matured and Clark anticipates no major problems.

"We said at the beginning we just wanted to survive Year One, then have good grass in Year Two," Clark said. "Year Three will be very good."

The lesson? Nature is a fickle beast.

"I don't know exactly what happened in Carolina," Cincinnati's Bradley said, "but there are so many circumstances working against the groundskeeper. You can go out on my field right now -- the footing is great, but you can see the signs of wear. You can invest two years in growing grass and -- wham! -- weather and circumstances can kill you."

Greg Garber is a senior writer for ESPN.com.